Iranian Missiles and Autonomous Weapons Being Used Against the US

Key Takeaways

• Iran operates the Middle East’s largest ballistic missile arsenal, estimated at 2,500+ missiles as of early 2026.
• The Shahed-136 one-way attack drone became Iran’s most exported weapon, used in 2026 across the region.
• Iran’s layered “missile cities” and dispersal doctrine survived decades of sanctions and two rounds of US-Israeli strikes.

Built for a War It Couldn’t Win Any Other Way

Iran’s relationship with missiles and unmanned weapons didn’t start with a desire to project power outward. It started with survival. During the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein’s forces fired hundreds of Scud ballistic missiles at Iranian cities in what became known as the War of the Cities. Tehran had almost nothing to fire back. Its air force, cut off from American spare parts after the 1979 revolution, degraded rapidly. Its army bled for eight years in trench warfare that recalled World War I more than any modern conflict. The lesson embedded itself: if Iran was ever going to deter a more powerful adversary, it couldn’t rely on planes or ships or conventional armies. It needed weapons that were cheap enough to produce in massive quantities, mobile enough to survive preemptive strikes, and capable of reaching enemy targets regardless of air superiority.

That strategic logic produced the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, a sprawling drone manufacturing complex, and a doctrine that has influenced how militaries from Russia to the Houthi movement in Yemen think about cheap, lethal, autonomous weapons. By March 2026, that arsenal was being used against the United States and Israel simultaneously, at volumes that tested every air defense system in the Gulf.

Understanding how Iran built all of this, and how it performed when the shooting started, requires going back before the first strike.

The IRGC and Who Controls the Weapons

Iran’s missile and drone forces do not belong to its conventional military in any meaningful operational sense. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a parallel military organization created after the 1979 revolution to protect the Islamic Republic from enemies both foreign and domestic, controls the strategic weapons. Within the IRGC, the Aerospace Force, commanded by Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh through the period leading into the 2026 conflict, runs the ballistic missile program, the cruise missile inventory, and the advanced drone fleet.

The separation between the IRGC and Iran’s regular Artesh army is not merely bureaucratic. The IRGC answers directly to the Supreme Leader, not the elected government. Its budget, its procurement decisions, and its operational authority over strategic strikes are insulated from the Iranian parliament and from any civilian ministry. When Iran launched missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in June 2025 and then again in February and March 2026, those orders came through an IRGC chain of command that ran from the Supreme Leader through the Aerospace Force commander, not through the Iranian presidency.

That command structure has enormous implications for how Iran escalates and de-escalates in a crisis. The IRGC has its own institutional incentives, its own sources of prestige, and its own interpretation of national interest that does not always align with the elected government’s. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was engaged in nuclear diplomacy with Oman as recently as February 27, 2026, one day before the strikes began. The IRGC’s strategic weapons, once ordered into action, operate on a different timeline.

The IRGC Aerospace Force’s missile production is handled through the Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO), a state-owned entity within the Defense Ministry, and the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, which has historically led Iran’s liquid-fuel ballistic missile programs. The Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group handles solid-fuel missile production. Both organizations have been sanctioned repeatedly by the United States and European countries. Both have continued operating.

The Ballistic Missile Arsenal

Iran’s ballistic missile inventory entering the 2025–2026 period was one of the most quantitatively significant missile arsenals outside Russia and China. Estimates of the total stockpile varied across sources, but the most widely cited figures before the June 2025 Twelve-Day War placed the count at approximately 3,000 missiles of varying ranges. By the IDF’s estimate in February 2026, following eight months of Iranian reconstruction after June 2025, the arsenal had reached approximately 2,500 missiles. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in early March 2026 that Iran had been producing more than 100 ballistic missiles per month in the period before the February 28 strikes began. Earlier Pentagon assessments had put monthly production closer to 50.

The inventory is best understood by range category, because range determines which targets Iran can threaten and therefore what strategic function each missile serves.

At the short end, the Fateh-110 family covers 200 to 500 kilometers, making it the primary tool for hitting Gulf state military bases and shipping infrastructure in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. The Fateh-110 is solid-fueled, road-mobile, and relatively quick to prepare for launch. Its improved derivative, the Fateh-313, extends that reach to roughly 500 kilometers with improved guidance. The Qiam-1 extends the short-range bracket to approximately 700 to 800 kilometers, enough to reach targets throughout the Gulf states. These systems, by virtue of their solid fuel and mobile launchers, are among the harder parts of Iran’s arsenal to find and destroy before launch.

Moving into the medium-range bracket, Iran fields the family of systems that poses the deepest concern to US planners and regional partners. The Shahab-3, Iran’s most mature liquid-fueled medium-range ballistic missile with a range of roughly 1,300 kilometers, has been in service for decades and gives Iran the ability to strike Israel and any US base in the Gulf from Iranian territory. The Emad, a Shahab-3 derivative with improved guidance, extends the range to approximately 1,700 kilometers. The Ghadr, another Shahab family member, reaches approximately 1,600 to 2,000 kilometers.

The Khorramshahr is Iran’s most precisely guided medium-range missile and, in the assessment of JINSA analysts, its most dangerous system. With a circular error probable of approximately 30 meters, half of all fired Khorramshahr missiles will land within 30 meters of their target. Combined with a warhead estimated at up to 1,800 kilograms, that accuracy at that payload is sufficient to threaten hardened military installations, not just area targets. The Khorramshahr-4 variant, which Iran used against US bases in Qatar and Bahrain during the March 2026 fighting, is equipped with a maneuvering reentry vehicle powered by small rocket thrusters that can adjust trajectory in the terminal phase, complicating intercept attempts by systems that rely on predicting ballistic trajectories. Iran has displayed at least four distinct Khorramshahr variants, and there is credible reporting that Russia assisted in upgrading the Khorramshahr’s lethality in 2025.

The Sejjil stands apart from the Shahab family in a technically important way: it is a two-stage solid-fueled missile with a range of approximately 2,000 kilometers. Solid fuel is operationally significant. Liquid-fueled missiles like the Shahab-3 require fueling before launch, a process that takes time and leaves the launcher visible to satellite imagery during the important preparation window. A missile loaded with solid propellant can be stored ready to fire and launched with minimal lead time. The Sejjil reduces the window during which Iran’s forces are vulnerable to preemptive strikes during a launch sequence. The IRGC claimed during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War that it had used the Sejjil-2 in combat for the first time, describing it as “a ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers, armed with a warhead of exceptionally destructive power.”

The newest additions to Iran’s public arsenal include the Kheibar Shekan, introduced in 2022, with a range of approximately 1,450 kilometers, and the Haj Qassem, named after the general killed in the 2020 US strike. Both are solid-fueled. The Kheibar Shekan-1 is specifically described by Iranian officials as capable of evading the US THAAD missile defense system. That claim has not been independently verified, but the design choices embedded in the missile, including the maneuvering reentry vehicle concept shared with the Khorramshahr-4, reflect a genuine engineering effort to complicate terminal-phase intercepts.

Iran has also publicly showcased the Fattah, which it describes as a hypersonic missile. The Fattah-1, unveiled in 2023, reportedly carries a range of 1,400 kilometers. Iranian officials claim the Fattah-2 can reach speeds of up to Mach 15, though independent analysts have expressed significant skepticism about that figure. The missile belongs to a category distinct from the two main types of hypersonic weapons being developed globally: unlike hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles, the Fattah is a ballistic missile with an additional solid rocket motor in its reentry vehicle that allows terminal maneuvering. Whether it meets the strict technical definition of “hypersonic” in the sense of maintaining Mach 5 speeds through atmospheric maneuvering is disputed, but the maneuvering capability is real and operationally relevant.

The Cruise Missile Dimension

Cruise missiles occupy a different tactical niche in Iran’s arsenal than ballistic missiles and are in some respects harder to defend against. They fly at low altitudes, can follow terrain contours to minimize radar exposure, and travel more slowly but with greater accuracy than many ballistic systems. Iran has invested substantially in cruise missile development since the 2010s.

The Paveh land-attack cruise missile has a reported range of approximately 1,650 kilometers, making it one of Iran’s longest-range cruise systems. It was featured prominently in the footage from Iranian underground “missile cities” released in March 2025. The Soumar, derived from Soviet Kh-55 technology acquired from Ukraine in the early 2000s, is assessed with a range of 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers. The Hoveyzeh, a derivative of the Soumar, has a reported range of 1,350 kilometers and was used by Iran in the April 2024 attacks on Israel during Operation True Promise II.

The combination of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in coordinated barrages exploits a fundamental weakness of layered air defense: different systems are needed to intercept different types of threats traveling at different speeds and altitudes. THAAD is optimized for ballistic missiles descending from high altitude. Patriot handles mid-altitude threats. Cruise missiles flying low require different sensors and interceptors. When Iran fires all three simultaneously, it forces defenders to divide their finite inventory of interceptors across multiple threat tracks.

The Shahed: A Weapon That Changed the Rules

No single Iranian weapons development has had more global impact than the Shahed-136. Designed and manufactured by the state-owned HESA and Shahed Aviation Industries in association with the IRGC, the Shahed-136 is a delta-winged, pusher-propeller one-way attack drone measuring 3.5 meters in length with a 2.5-meter wingspan. It carries a warhead estimated at 30 to 50 kilograms, flies at approximately 185 kilometers per hour, and has a range estimated between 1,000 and 2,500 kilometers depending on the flight profile and payload. It costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to manufacture, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The drone is autonomous in the sense that matters most for cost-effective warfare: once launched with target coordinates, it navigates without further operator input. Earlier variants used a combination of inertial measurement and GPS guidance to hit fixed targets. The GPS dependency was a known vulnerability. Post-2022, as Russia began deploying the Shahed at industrial scale against Ukraine as the Geran-2, both Russia and Iran worked to harden the navigation systems against jamming. By early 2026, recovered drone remains in Ukraine showed jamming-resistant antennas, mobile network-based navigation using SIM cards from multiple European countries, and in some variants, integration with Starlink satellite connectivity for real-time guidance. Whether the drones Iran used in the February-March 2026 Middle East campaign had these upgrades applied is not definitively established in public reporting, but the engineering trajectory strongly suggests continued improvement.

Iran is believed to have produced tens of thousands of Shahed-136 drones before the February 2026 conflict began. Russia was producing its Geran-2 variant at a rate reportedly aimed at reaching 1,000 per day by 2026. Ukraine reported that Russia launched over 38,000 Shahed-type drones throughout 2025 alone. The scale of production achieved through the Iranian-Russian manufacturing partnership, centered on the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, demonstrated that the Shahed’s industrial model could scale to numbers that no Western air defense system was financially equipped to intercept indefinitely.

By March 5, 2026, a military source cited by Iran’s Fars News Agency stated that Iran had fired nearly 2,000 drones since February 28. The UAE alone reported intercepting 645 of 689 detected drone attacks through March 4. Those interception numbers, while reflecting impressive defensive performance, also point to the central problem: for every drone the UAE shot down, it expended an interceptor that costs orders of magnitude more. One Council on Foreign Relations analysis estimated that for every dollar Iran spent manufacturing a Shahed drone, the UAE spent approximately $20 to $28 to intercept it.

Shahed Variants and the Jet-Powered Upgrade

The original Shahed-136 was not standing still. By the time of the 2026 Iran war, Iran had publicly unveiled multiple variants that addressed the system’s key limitations, primarily its slow speed, which gave defenders longer engagement windows.

The Shahed-131 is a smaller companion to the 136, following the same design logic in a more compact airframe. It can be fielded in higher numbers per launcher and carries a somewhat lighter warhead. Its purpose is saturation: send enough small, cheap drones to overwhelm the processing capacity of an air defense system, creating gaps through which larger and more capable systems can pass unengaged.

The Shahed-238 addresses the speed problem directly. It is a jet-powered derivative that Iran officially unveiled in November 2023, with a reported top speed of 500 to 800 kilometers per hour. The jet engine compresses the defender’s engagement window from minutes to seconds at close range and extends the range of the drone’s effective speed profile. The Shahed-238 also features upgraded guidance systems with radar and electro-optical/infrared homing capability, allowing it to track moving targets in a way the original GPS-only Shahed could not reliably do. A Ukrainian military analysis of a recovered Geran-3 (the Russian designation for the Shahed-238 derivative) found a Czech engine, Canadian satellite navigation technology, and US software components, all acquired through civilian commercial channels before being incorporated into a weapon system. The international component supply chain embedded in Iranian drone technology created diplomatic complications that persisted through 2025 and 2026.

The Shahed-147 and higher-numbered variants remain less well-documented in open sources but have been displayed by the IRGC, with Iranian state media showing them alongside hypersonic missile systems at capability demonstrations in 2025.

The Mohajer Family

Not all Iranian drones are one-way weapons. The Mohajer-6 is a reconnaissance and precision strike UAV designed to return after its mission rather than detonate on impact. With approximately 12 hours of endurance and a line-of-sight datalink range of around 200 kilometers, it carries electro-optical and infrared sensors as well as the capability to deploy Qaem precision-guided bombs. The Mohajer family has been used in the Iran-Iraq War and across Iran’s various proxy networks; Iran has exported versions to Russia for use in Ukraine.

The Mohajer-6’s role in a conflict against US and Israeli forces is primarily as a targeting and reconnaissance asset rather than a primary strike weapon. It can loiter over a battlefield, identify high-value targets, and direct ballistic missile salvos or provide battle damage assessment after strikes. That intelligence function, flying an autonomous or remotely piloted platform over the target area before and after a salvo, is the kind of capability that dramatically improves the effectiveness of the ballistic missiles it supports.

The Ababil family, including the Ababil-5, represents a higher level of autonomy. These drones are described in Iranian state media as capable of operating in GPS-denied environments using computer vision systems, and as capable of tracking moving targets including warships. The incorporation of what Iranian sources describe as AI-enabled targeting functions into the Ababil series reflects an engineering direction consistent with what analysts observed in Russian-deployed Geran derivatives in Ukraine: iterative integration of more capable autonomous guidance that reduces reliance on satellite navigation and increases resistance to electronic warfare.

The Missile Cities

Iran built its first underground missile base in 1984, during the Iran-Iraq War, as a direct response to Iraqi Scud attacks on Iranian cities. Four decades later, the IRGC Aerospace Force operates what it describes as hundreds of these facilities, distributed across every province in Iran. They call them “missile cities.”

The scale of the infrastructure involved is genuinely difficult to comprehend from satellite imagery alone, because the most sensitive parts are underground and sealed from view. Iranian state media releases of these facilities in 2025, intended as deterrence messaging in the months before the February 2026 strikes, showed tunnel systems wide enough to drive trucks through, with rows of road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers stacked alongside missiles still in their shipping containers. The March 2025 unveiling of what Iran described as its largest missile city showed Kheibar Shekan, Haj Qassem, Emad, Sejjil, and Ghadr-H ballistic missiles alongside Paveh cruise missiles, all stored in continuous tunnel sections. An IRGC commander stated during one such reveal that if Iran unveiled a new missile city every week, it would take two more years to show them all.

The tunnels are carved into mountains where possible, placing hundreds of meters of rock between the stored missiles and any surface attack. Typical missile storage tunnels are estimated to run 30 to 80 meters underground, though the IRGC has claimed some facilities reach depths of 500 meters in mountain terrain. The facilities have autonomous power systems, independent of the civilian power grid, and some are adapted for underground launches, allowing missiles to be fired from hardened positions without requiring the launcher to emerge to the surface before firing.

Before the June 2025 strikes, analysts identified at least 24 missile sites in western Iran, with major clusters around Kermanshah including the Konesh Canyon complex, and additional facilities extending through Lorestan and the Zagros mountain region. Hardened silo-type installations such as the Haji Abad complex in Hormozgan province were positioned to target Gulf naval targets. The broader network was explicitly designed to be impossible to destroy in a single strike campaign, both by virtue of sheer number and by geographic dispersal.

The vulnerability analysts did identify in these facilities was not depth, but layout. Footage of Iran’s underground missile cities showed missiles and launchers stored in open continuous tunnels without blast doors or separated revetments. A single penetrating munition capable of initiating a stored missile’s propellant could, in theory, trigger a chain reaction through an entire tunnel section. Whether the US or Israeli strikes in the 2025–2026 campaigns exploited that vulnerability effectively has not been definitively established in public reporting as of March 9, 2026.

Iran’s Doctrine: Deterrence by Punishment

Iran’s strategic approach to its missile and drone arsenal is built around a concept analysts call deterrence by punishment. Unlike deterrence by denial, which tries to convince an adversary that an attack will fail, deterrence by punishment accepts that Iran cannot stop a US or Israeli attack and instead aims to raise the cost to the attacker to an unacceptable level. The core threat is retaliatory damage: if you strike us, we will inflict economically and politically significant damage on your forces, your allies, and the global economy through energy infrastructure and shipping lane disruption.

This doctrine explains several features of Iran’s arsenal that might otherwise seem paradoxical. Iran maintains a self-imposed maximum missile range of 2,000 kilometers, established as policy in 2015. That limit is not a technical ceiling; the Khorramshahr could almost certainly reach longer ranges with a lighter warhead, and some European analysts assessed a variant as qualifying for intermediate-range classification. The limit is a political signal: Iran does not want missiles that can strike the continental United States, because such capability would trigger a qualitatively different American response. The 2,000-kilometer limit places Israel, the Gulf states, and every US military base in the region within reach while avoiding the provocation of developing a genuine intercontinental threat.

The doctrine also explains Iran’s heavy investment in volume over sophistication. The United States has more advanced missiles, better aircraft, and superior electronics. Iran can’t match that quality. What it can produce is quantity: enough missiles and drones to stress-test the interceptor inventory of every air defense system in the Gulf simultaneously. As Naysan Rafati of the International Crisis Group observed in March 2026, Iran’s “go big or go home” calculus in the current conflict reflected a regime calculation that restraint would be read as weakness, and that expanding the conflict horizontally by targeting US allies across the region raised the political cost of continuing the war faster than it raised Iran’s own losses.

The layered attack profile that Iran executes in practice, combining slow Shahed drones with faster ballistic missiles and terrain-hugging cruise missiles in coordinated waves, is also a doctrinal choice. The three threat types travel at different speeds, fly at different altitudes, and require different interceptors. A Patriot battery engaged in tracking a Khorramshahr-4 is consuming radar time and interceptor readiness capacity that reduces its ability to simultaneously engage a swarm of Shahed drones arriving from a different vector. Iran’s war planners have understood this since at least 2019, when they executed coordinated drone and cruise missile strikes on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing facilities in an attack that temporarily cut Saudi oil output by roughly half. That attack has never been officially attributed to Iran, but US and Saudi officials consistently pointed to Iran as responsible, and the attack demonstrated the layered mixed-platform concept years before it was executed at full scale in 2026.

Performance in Combat: June 2025

The June 2025 Twelve-Day War provided the most comprehensive real-world test of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal before February 2026. Over the course of that conflict, Iran fired approximately 550 ballistic missiles and approximately 1,000 drones at Israeli targets. The majority were intercepted by a combination of Israeli Arrow, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome systems, alongside US Navy Arleigh Burke destroyers operating in the eastern Mediterranean, and Royal Air Force aircraft deployed in the region.

Those launches, despite high intercept rates, killed dozens of Israelis and caused significant damage to buildings and infrastructure. They also served their strategic purpose of demonstrating that Iran’s arsenal was real, functional, and capable of saturating even one of the most capable layered air defense systems in the world. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Israel likely destroyed approximately one-third of Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile during the June 2025 fighting, between those Iran launched and those destroyed on the ground. Iran claimed to have replenished most of that loss by February 2026.

The June 2025 war also marked the first combat use of the Sejjil-2 solid-fuel ballistic missile and what Iranian officials described as the operational deployment of the Fattah hypersonic system. Independent verification of those claims from outside Iranian state media sources has not been fully established, but the IRGC’s willingness to expend its newest and most advanced systems against Israeli targets in 2025 indicated that the arsenal’s advanced tier was considered combat-ready, not merely a deterrent display.

Performance in Combat: February-March 2026

When Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, Iran launched its retaliatory campaign within hours. By March 5, more than 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones had been fired at targets across the region. The geographic breadth of the strikes was unprecedented: Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Azerbaijan, Oman, and Iraq all reported incoming Iranian fire.

The following table summarizes the key Iranian weapons systems used in the 2025–2026 conflict period.

The Khorramshahr-4 emerged as a particularly troubling weapon in the March 2026 fighting. Iran used it against US bases in Qatar and Bahrain on March 6, 2026, targeting Al Udeid Air Base, which houses the largest US military installation in the region, and the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama. The maneuvering reentry vehicle in the Khorramshahr-4 introduces an intercept challenge that THAAD and standard Patriot systems are not optimally configured to handle. The THAAD battery is designed around a predictable ballistic trajectory; a warhead that adjusts its path in the terminal phase, even modestly, forces the intercept algorithm to update rapidly and can cause intercept attempts to miss.

Iranian Shahed-136 drones successfully struck the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain’s capital Manama on February 28, scoring a direct hit on a radome at the US base. The USS Fifth Fleet’s home port at Naval Support Activity Bahrain was hit repeatedly through March. These strikes did not destroy the US naval presence in Bahrain, but they demonstrated that the Shahed could reach and damage specific installations at the heart of US regional power projection.

The rate of Iranian fire declined significantly through the first week of the operation. By March 5, CENTCOM reported a 90 percent reduction in Iranian ballistic missile launches from the peak and an 83 percent reduction in drone attacks. CENTCOM and the IDF attributed that decline to a combination of physical destruction, with over 300 Iranian ballistic missile launchers rendered inoperable by March 5, and Iranian strategic rationing of remaining inventory. The decline in launch rates did not mean the arsenal was exhausted. It meant Iran was managing its remaining stocks, likely anticipating that the conflict would extend and that its ability to sustain a prolonged campaign mattered more than maximizing early-phase firepower.

Iran’s strikes also illustrated the geographic reach of its retaliatory doctrine in practice. A Shahed-136 hit a radome at US Naval Support Activity Bahrain, striking the headquarters compound of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Drones struck near the Fairmont The Palm Hotel on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah and caused a fire at the US consulate in Dubai. A missile hit Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3, causing minor structural damage and requiring evacuation. These were not purely military targets, and the spread of effects across civilian infrastructure in some of the most densely populated commercial zones in the world reflected both the imprecision inherent in mass drone campaigns and the deliberate strategic logic of raising the economic and political costs of continuing the war for Washington’s regional partners.

Iranian state television and IRGC media announced 19 successive phases of retaliatory strikes in the first days, each naming specific target sets and claiming specific hits. The IRGC said that in its nineteenth phase, a Khorramshahr-4 was launched at central Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and an Israeli air base. Fires and damage were reported at multiple locations. Israel and US forces denied the most severe Iranian claims, as they had in June 2025, and the fog of wartime damage assessment on both sides made independent verification difficult given Iran’s restricted media environment and both sides’ incentives to manage public perception.

The Economics of Drone Saturation

The financial arithmetic of Iran’s drone campaign against US and allied air defense systems had been understood theoretically for years before February 2026 turned it into a live operational problem. A Shahed-136 costs $20,000 to $50,000 to manufacture. An American Patriot interceptor missile costs approximately $3 to $4 million. An Israeli Arrow-3 interceptor runs considerably more. A THAAD interceptor runs approximately $11 million.

Every time a Shahed drone is intercepted, the defending state spends at least 100 times what Iran spent to produce the threat. At scale, that exchange rate is unsustainable. The UAE intercepted 645 drones through March 4, 2026, at a cost that one Council on Foreign Relations analysis estimated represented roughly $20 to $28 in UAE defense spending for every dollar Iran spent on the attack. Multiply that across the entire campaign, across every Gulf state, across every US base that required intercept capacity, and the financial burden on the defending side vastly exceeded Iran’s manufacturing investment.

The US request to Ukraine for assistance in countering Iranian drones in March 2026 was a concrete acknowledgment of this problem. Ukraine’s military had developed extensive expertise in intercepting Shahed drones over three years of Russian attacks, developing cheaper counter-drone methods including electronic warfare, FPV drone intercepts, and training gunners to engage them at close range with cheaper anti-aircraft weapons rather than expensive missiles. That expertise was something no Gulf state possessed at the scale required, and it says something about how thoroughly the Shahed had changed the calculus of air defense that the world’s most powerful military was consulting a country fighting a ground war with Russia for help dealing with Iran’s cheapest weapons.

Lockheed Martin produced approximately 600 Patriot interceptors in 2025 and was targeting a production increase to 2,000 annually by 2027. That timeline was not fast enough for the February 2026 conflict, and Gulf states were already running low on interceptors by early March. The prospect of drawing on Indo-Pacific stockpiles, reserves maintained specifically to deter China, to replenish Gulf defenses was being raised in Washington by the first week of the war.

Proxy Networks and Technology Transfer

Iran’s weapons influence extended far beyond its own territory before the 2026 conflict began. The IRGC supplied Shahed-136 drones to Russia starting in late 2022 and to Houthi forces in Yemen, who used them alongside Iranian-supplied anti-ship missiles against commercial shipping in the Red Sea throughout 2024 and 2025. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Lebanon received Iranian ballistic missile technology, including Fateh-110 variants, that expanded Iran’s effective strike range by enabling proxy forces to launch from positions closer to targets than Iranian territory.

Russia’s adaptation of the Shahed into the Geran-2, and subsequent variants including the Geran-3 (Shahed-238 derivative), created an entirely separate industrial-scale production program outside Iranian territory. By 2026, Russia was producing thousands of Shahed derivatives per month at the Alabuga factory in Tatarstan and deploying them in mass barrages against Ukraine. That manufacturing partnership gave Iran an effective force multiplier: it could supply technology once and benefit from an ally’s ability to produce at a rate Iran’s domestic capacity could not match.

North Korea played a separate but important role in Iran’s ballistic missile development history. The Khorramshahr traces its lineage directly to North Korea’s Hwasong-10 missile, which North Korea sold to Iran under the designation BM-25. China supplied chemical precursors for solid rocket motor propellant, with European intelligence sources reporting in October 2025 that Iran had received substantial shipments of these materials, enabling Iran’s solid-fuel missile production scale-up after the June 2025 war. The triangular relationship between Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea in missile and drone technology exchange has allowed Tehran to sustain a development program that the combined weight of Western sanctions was intended to prevent.

Whether those Russian-produced Geran drones found their way back into Iran’s inventory before the 2026 conflict remains unclear in open-source reporting. The technology transfer relationship between Tehran and Moscow had, by this point, become a two-way street in some respects, with Russia reportedly assisting in upgrading the Khorramshahr-4’s lethality. The exact nature of Russian technical assistance to Iran’s missile program in 2025 is one of the least-documented but most consequential elements of the entire conflict.

The Autonomous Question

Iran’s drone and missile programs exist in a different relationship to the concept of autonomy than US systems like LUCAS. The Shahed-136, in its core configuration, is autonomous in navigation and terminal guidance: it flies to a set of GPS coordinates without human input after launch. The more advanced variants, incorporating computer vision guidance and AI-assisted target acquisition from the Ababil-5 and later Mohajer derivatives, move toward what Iranian state media describes as the ability to identify and track specific target types, including warships, and adjust terminal approach accordingly.

Iran has not published technical specifications or policy frameworks for these systems’ autonomous capabilities. The IRGC presents its drone program primarily through demonstrations and operational results rather than doctrinal documents. What is visible in the combat record is that Iranian drones in the 2026 campaign successfully hit specific buildings, radomes, and installations rather than simply impacting in a broad target area, suggesting guidance precision sufficient for designated-point targeting.

Books examining the historical development of drone warfare, like Wired for War by P.W. Singer, written long before the Shahed’s rise, described the trajectory toward autonomous lethal systems in ways that read differently after watching Iranian drones hit the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain. The documentary National Bird explored drone warfare from the American side; the Iranian side of that equation, the low-cost autonomous platform designed to be available in thousands rather than dozens, had no comparable cultural examination in the West until events forced the question into the open.

The Kill Chain by Christian Brose, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director, argued that the US risked losing future conflicts precisely because adversaries had adopted affordable autonomous systems faster than American acquisition bureaucracy could respond. Iran’s Shahed program was the specific example he might have wished he’d used more prominently.

Vulnerabilities and the Counter-Arsenal Problem

For all of its scale and sophistication, Iran’s missile and drone arsenal entered the 2026 conflict with known vulnerabilities that US and Israeli planners had spent years preparing to exploit.

The most significant was launcher dependence. Iran’s ballistic missiles, regardless of where they are stored, must be loaded onto transporter-erector-launchers and driven to firing positions before launch. Those launchers, whether mobile or fixed in underground silos, are the chokepoint through which all ballistic missile capacity flows. The June 2025 Twelve-Day War demonstrated this: Israel’s strikes destroyed or blocked access to approximately 95 ballistic missile launchers, according to JINSA analysis, and Iran undertook intensive efforts through late 2025 to excavate blocked launchers and repair damaged ones. The IDF reported rendering more than 300 ballistic missile launchers inoperable by March 5, 2026, contributing directly to the 90 percent reduction in launch rates CENTCOM confirmed.

The surface launch requirement for liquid-fueled missiles creates a detection window. Satellite imagery of Iranian launch preparation, including the movement of fuel trucks and the extension of missile launchers from tunnel entrances, can provide advance warning. Iran’s investment in solid-fueled systems, which eliminate the fueling delay, was explicitly an attempt to close that detection window, and the Sejjil’s solid fuel is a direct engineering response to this vulnerability.

The missile production facilities themselves represent a second layer of vulnerability. The Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group facilities, the Shahid Bakeri sites, and the Parchin Military Complex all play roles in Iran’s missile and warhead production. Israeli strikes hit both Parchin and the Shahrud Missile Test Site during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, causing damage of unknown operational extent. The IDF struck Parchin again in the March 2026 campaign, alongside missile engine production facilities and warhead explosive manufacturing sites. Whether these production strikes meaningfully degraded Iran’s manufacturing capacity over the longer term is a question that satellite imagery and intelligence analysis will be working to answer for months after the shooting stops.

The drone arsenal’s vulnerability is more diffuse. Shahed-136 production is distributed across multiple facilities, some reportedly relocated underground in 2018. Destroying the production base would require finding and striking dozens of facilities, not a handful of large assembly plants. The relative simplicity of the Shahed’s components, most of which are commercially available electronics and a commodity piston engine, means that production is not dependent on a small number of specialized suppliers.

Reconstitution and the Long Game

One of the most consequential aspects of Iran’s approach to its arsenal is that the country has been here before and rebuilt. The June 2025 Twelve-Day War destroyed what the Institute for the Study of War estimated was roughly one-third of Iran’s ballistic missile inventory. By IDF estimates in February 2026, Iran had reconstituted to approximately 2,500 missiles, producing dozens per month through a reconstruction effort supported by solid-fuel propellant precursor imports from China and Russian technical assistance.

That reconstitution record is the clearest evidence that degrading Iran’s missile capacity through air strikes alone does not produce a permanent reduction in capability. It produces a temporary reduction followed by a rebuilding effort. The question is not whether Iran can rebuild but at what cost, at what speed, and whether the political conditions that might produce a negotiated resolution can be created faster than Iran’s industrial base can replace what was destroyed.

Secretary of State Rubio’s claim in early March 2026 that Iran had been producing more than 100 ballistic missiles per month before the February 28 strikes creates a rough baseline: at that production rate, a campaign that destroys 1,000 launchers and missiles creates a recovery timeline of approximately ten months, assuming the production infrastructure remains intact. The rate at which US and Israeli strikes were targeting production facilities in Phase Two of Epic Fury suggested an explicit attempt to extend that recovery timeline by attacking capacity rather than only inventory.

Whether that industrial targeting strategy succeeds, and whether Iran’s political leadership makes different choices during any period of reduced missile capacity, is where military analysis shades into political speculation. The arsenal that Iran built over 40 years was a response to a specific strategic problem: how to deter a vastly superior adversary at affordable cost. That problem hasn’t changed. Whatever emerges from the 2026 conflict politically, the incentives that produced the Shahed-136 and the Khorramshahr-4 and hundreds of underground missile cities will still be present.

Summary

Iran’s missile and drone arsenal, as it stood in March 2026, was the product of four decades of deliberate investment in asymmetric deterrence. The IRGC Aerospace Force fields an inventory estimated at 2,500 or more ballistic missiles spanning multiple range categories, cruise missiles with ranges approaching 2,000 kilometers, and tens of thousands of Shahed-series one-way attack drones that have reshaped how every military on earth thinks about the economics of air defense. The Khorramshahr-4, with its maneuvering reentry vehicle and 30-meter accuracy, is the most precise Iranian ballistic missile ever built. The Shahed-136, at $20,000 to $50,000 per unit and producible at industrial scale, is the most consequential.

The performance of these systems against US and allied defenses in February and March 2026 confirmed what the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea and Iranian strikes on Israel in 2024 had already strongly suggested: that volume, affordability, and autonomous navigation in combination constitute a military capability that the most sophisticated air defense architectures can attrit but cannot simply absorb indefinitely. Interceptor stockpile depletion across Gulf states by early March 2026 demonstrated that the financial arithmetic Iran had been banking on since the Shahed’s first deployment was, under wartime conditions, producing the exact strategic effect it was designed to produce.

What Iran’s missile program could not compensate for was the loss of the air defense and command and control infrastructure needed to protect the launchers, production facilities, and leadership that make the arsenal function. The combination of US and Israeli air dominance, electronic warfare, and targeting of production sites represented an attempt to dismantle the system around the weapons rather than simply intercepting the weapons in flight. As of March 9, 2026, whether that attempt succeeded in producing a durable change in Iran’s military capacity, or whether it set the stage for another decade of reconstitution, remained an open question with consequences that extended well beyond the immediate conflict.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is Iran’s largest and most capable ballistic missile?

The Khorramshahr-4 is widely assessed as Iran’s most capable ballistic missile in the medium-range category. It has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, can carry a warhead estimated at up to 1,800 kilograms, and is equipped with a maneuvering reentry vehicle that adjusts trajectory in the terminal phase to complicate intercept attempts. Iran used the Khorramshahr-4 against US bases in Qatar and Bahrain in March 2026.

What is the Shahed-136 and how does it work?

The Shahed-136 is an Iranian-designed one-way attack drone built by state-owned HESA and Shahed Aviation Industries. It measures 3.5 meters in length with a 2.5-meter wingspan, flies at approximately 185 kilometers per hour using a gasoline piston engine, and carries a warhead of 30 to 50 kilograms. It uses GPS and inertial navigation to fly autonomously to a set of target coordinates and detonates on impact. It costs between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit.

How many missiles and drones did Iran fire after February 28, 2026?

By March 5, 2026, Iran had fired more than 500 ballistic and naval missiles and approximately 2,000 drones since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury on February 28. Around 40 percent of those launches targeted Israel; approximately 60 percent were directed at US military bases and allied targets across the region, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan.

What are Iran’s underground missile cities?

Iran’s underground missile bases, referred to as “missile cities” by the IRGC, are extensive fortified tunnel networks constructed beneath mountains and hills across all of Iran’s provinces. They house ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, mobile launchers, fuel systems, and command infrastructure. Typical tunnels run 30 to 80 meters underground, with some claimed to reach 500 meters in mountain terrain. The IRGC Aerospace Force claims to operate hundreds of these facilities.

How did Iran build such a large missile arsenal under sanctions?

Iran’s missile program began during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War with Scud-B missiles acquired through Libya and then North Korea. Over decades, the Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Bakeri industrial groups reverse-engineered North Korean and Soviet technology to develop domestic production capabilities. China and North Korea provided components and technical assistance for liquid and solid-fuel missile programs respectively, and Russia assisted in upgrading the Khorramshahr-4 in 2025. Component procurement used front companies and civilian supply chains to evade sanctions.

What makes Iran’s drone campaign economically significant?

The Shahed-136 costs $20,000 to $50,000 to manufacture, while the interceptors used to destroy it cost between $3 million and $12 million each depending on the system. For every dollar Iran spent on a Shahed drone, defending Gulf states spent approximately $20 to $28 in interceptor costs. At the scale of thousands of drones over days of fighting, this asymmetry rapidly depleted interceptor stockpiles across multiple Gulf states, creating a sustainability problem for defenders that no amount of tactical skill could fully resolve.

What is the Sejjil missile and why does its fuel type matter?

The Sejjil is a two-stage Iranian medium-range ballistic missile with a range of approximately 2,000 kilometers using solid fuel. Solid fuel is operationally significant because the missile can be stored ready to fire and launched with minimal preparation time, unlike liquid-fueled missiles such as the Shahab-3, which require fueling before launch. The fueling process creates a detectable window during which satellite imagery can warn defenders of imminent launches. The Sejjil’s solid fuel was explicitly developed to eliminate that vulnerability.

Which IRGC unit controls Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones?

The IRGC Aerospace Force, commanded in the period leading into the 2026 conflict by Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, is responsible for Iran’s ballistic missile program, cruise missile inventory, and advanced drone fleet. This organization answers to the Supreme Leader through the IRGC command chain, separate from Iran’s conventional Artesh military and from the elected civilian government. The IRGC Aerospace Force oversees missile production through the Aerospace Industries Organization and the Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Bakeri industrial groups.

How did Iran’s missile performance compare between June 2025 and February 2026?

In the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, Iran fired approximately 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones at Israeli targets, with the majority intercepted. The Institute for the Study of War estimated Israel destroyed roughly one-third of Iran’s ballistic missile inventory. In the February-March 2026 conflict, Iran fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones in the first week alone against targets across the entire region. Ballistic missile launch rates declined 90 percent by March 5 as launchers were destroyed and Iran rationed remaining inventory.

What are the known vulnerabilities in Iran’s missile arsenal?

Iran’s most significant structural vulnerability is launcher dependence: ballistic missiles must be transported to launch positions on road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers that can be detected by satellite and targeted from the air. Liquid-fueled systems require a visible fueling process that creates a detection window before launch. Missile production is concentrated in identifiable facilities, including the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group and Shahrud Missile Test Site, which were targeted in both the 2025 and 2026 campaigns. Underground missile storage, while resilient, may be vulnerable to chain-reaction detonation if penetrating munitions initiate stored propellant.