General Discussion

Three weeks of intensive US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure have destroyed radar systems, collapsed tunnel entrances, and cratered ventilation shafts across dozens of sites. Iran keeps firing. The reason, according to satellite analysis by CNN and assessments by Israeli security research centre Alma Research, lies not above the ground but hundreds of metres beneath it; inside a network of underground missile cities connected by internal railways, carved into mountains that no bomb in the current American or Israeli arsenal can fully reach.

Iran’s underground missile programme is not a recent improvisation. Reports that emerged as far back as 2020 claimed an automated railway system running through cavernous tunnels, transporting ballistic missiles between assembly halls, storage vaults, and blast-door exits. What is becoming clearer now, as Operation Epic Fury enters its fourth week, is the scale of what was built and the limits of what air power alone can do against it.....

The central constraint is geological, and it has now been publicly stated by Iran itself. Former IRGC Aerospace Force commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that Iran built its missile bases across provinces and cities at a depth of 500 metres.

The most powerful weapon the United States has for destroying hardened underground targets is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator – a 30,000-pound bomb built specifically for this purpose. It can penetrate “approximately 60 metres of reinforced concrete or roughly 40 metres of moderate rock. Granite is harder than moderate rock. Five hundred metres is more than twelve times the weapon’s maximum penetration depth. The gap between the bomb and the tunnel is not a margin of error.”....

“IRGC did not prepare for this war by building rockets. It prepared by building railways inside mountains. The rockets are replaceable. The railways are permanent. And the granite that protects them was formed before mammals existed. The strait is 21 miles wide. The mountain is 500 metres deep. And the railway inside it is still delivering missiles to the surface,” he added.

Link to tweet

Iran has continued to fire ballistic missiles throughout Operation Epic Fury, including the attempted strike on the joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia. Trump has said the operation is running weeks ahead of schedule and that Iran’s military is finished. The satellite imagery and the institutional assessments tell a more complicated story: one in which the visible war, fought above ground, has made genuine progress, and the invisible war, fought half a kilometre underground, has barely begun.