From the Wall Street Journal via MSN, March 5:
Iran’s underground ‘missile cities’ have become one of its biggest vulnerabilities
Iran spent decades constructing underground bunkers to shield its vast missile arsenal from destruction. Less than a week into the war with its two most powerful adversaries, the strategy is beginning to look like a blunder.
U.S. and Israeli war planes and armed drones are circling over the dozens of cavernous bases, striking missile-carrying launchers when they emerge to fire. Meanwhile, waves of heavy bombers have dropped munitions on the sites, apparently entombing the Iranian weapons below ground in some locations.
Satellite imagery taken in recent days shows the smoldering remains of several Iranian missiles and launchers destroyed in U.S. and Israeli airstrikes near entrances to the “missile cities,” as Iranian officials call the subterranean sites.
Tehran managed to shoot more than 500 missiles at Israel, at U.S. bases and at other targets in the Persian Gulf region since the conflict began this past Saturday, although many have been intercepted, according to governments in the region. There have been fewer large salvos since the first days of the conflict, a sign that the U.S.-Israeli attacks are degrading Tehran’s ability to strike back.
“We’re hunting Iran’s last remaining ballistic missile launchers to eliminate what I would characterize as their lingering ballistic missile capability,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in a video briefing Tuesday. “We’re seeing Iran’s ability to hit us and our partners is declining.”
Tehran appears to have moved some of its missiles and truck launchers out of the bunkers before the war began, hoping to protect them from attack by dispersing them. Cooper said the U.S. and Israel have destroyed hundreds of missiles, launchers and drones.
U.S. Central Command, which is conducting the air campaign, said Wednesday that Iran’s missile launches have dropped 86% in four days.
Analysts said it is likely that much of Tehran’s remaining stockpile of thousands of medium- and short-range missiles remains in underground bases whose locations are mostly known to the U.S. and Israeli militaries.
That underscores a fundamental flaw in the missile-city concept: “What was once mobile and difficult to find is no longer mobile, and easier to hit,” said Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research organization in Monterey, Calif....
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Earlier:
