Iranian missiles show deadly precision amid US-Iran war escalation
The killing of three US soldiers at a Jordan base shows Iran maintains the ability to exact a deadly toll in grinding conflict. An Iranian
The killing of three US soldiers at a Jordan base shows Iran maintains the ability to exact a deadly toll in grinding conflict. An Iranian attack on a United States military site in Jordan that killed three US soldiers has shown the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) ability to inflict a deadly toll five months into the US-Israel war on Iran. The strikes on Friday were the first time US soldiers have been killed by Iranian attacks on US military installations since March 1, just hours after the US and Israel launched the war. While the Pentagon has not released full details of the attack, analysts say the deadly incident underscores an uncomfortable reality for Washington: Despite barrage after barrage of US air strikes, Iran maintains the military capability it needs to continue a prolonged asymmetric war. “Iran’s military capabilities remain formidable. It has reconstituted faster than expected,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank, told Al Jazeera. “Its attacks are becoming more precise over time, likely with the help of Russian and Chinese intelligence,” she added. “Iran’s military is certainly not ‘combat ineffective’ as the Pentagon has suggested. It has sustained significant damage but is learning and adapting over time.” Why is Iran still able to kill US soldiers? Iran’s ability to continue to kill US personnel in the region is due to a combination of many factors, undergirded by the location and design of the US military sites spread across the Middle East and the Gulf, according to Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. Some 50,000 US forces are operating from “exposed, fixed bases within range of Iran’s increasingly sophisticated missile and drone arsenal”, he said. Many personnel are “often housed in semi-permanent facilities, designed primarily to protect against rockets, mortars and improvised explosive devices, rather than precision ballistic missiles carrying large warheads”.
Such strikes, therefore, can “cause substantial damage”, he said. Near misses can lead to traumatic brain injuries from “blast overpressure”, while interceptions can cause injury from falling debris. All told, the official US military death toll in the war stands at 18, including the seven soldiers killed in the March 1 Iranian strikes on a tactical operations centre in Kuwait and the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia. Aside from the three killed in Jordan, the military has said other deaths were not the direct result of Iranian strikes. They include six airmen killed in an accidental refuelling crash in March and, most recently, an Army sergeant killed during the controlled detonation of a downed armed drone in Iraq. About 500 US soldiers have been wounded since the war began, with about 220 structures and pieces of major US military equipment or buildings reported damaged or destroyed following the breakdown of the ceasefire on July 8. Overwhelming air defence Iran has relied on its “increasingly sophisticated” missile and drone arsenal to overwhelm US air defence systems, including the surface-to-air Patriot systems and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile intercepting system, according to Krieg. It has developed ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as armed drones, that can approach targets “along different trajectories and different speeds”. When coupled with decoys and dispersed sites, they can render the US defence systems less effective. “Even when most incoming weapons are destroyed, a small number penetrating the defensive shield can inflict considerable casualties,” Krieg said. Mona Yacoubian, the director of the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that Iran appeared to show “greater intent” in attacking US military assets in the recent round of attacks, compared with the early weeks of the war. “I think what’s important to underscore is that this does appear to be a new pattern in terms of, I would argue, the intensity of Iranian strikes that are seeking to hit US military targets,” she said.
The BriefWire