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| Fateh-110 (Image: Flickr User - The Israel Project) |
By Franz-Stefan Gady
A new comparative analysis sheds light on the threat Tehran’s ballistic missile force poses to U.S. airbases.
China and Iran’s anti-access/anti-denial capabilities are often lumped together in public statements by senior U.S. defense officials and the American media. That frequently leads to a mischaracterization of Tehran’s A2/AD capabilities — particularly when discussing Iran’s conventional ballistic missile force.
A new operational analysis by Jacob L. Heim, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, published in the Air & Space Power Journal [PDF], offers a comparative perspective of the risk to U.S. air bases from Chinese and Iranian conventional theater ballistic missiles, key weapon systems in both countries’ A2/AD strategies.
Unsurprisingly, Heim concludes that the U.S. airpower faces a larger threat from China in East Asia than Iran in Southwest Asia. Indeed, he calls Iranian claims that its military has the ability to “obliterate all… (U.S.) bases” in Southwest Asia “bluster and bluff.”
“The accuracy, payloads, and ranges of the weapons in Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal are inadequate to seriously threaten U.S. air operations, in part because U.S. forces could operate from a large number of bases outside the worst threat ring (i.e., more than 500 km from Iran’s border),” Heim summarizes.
Read the full story at The Diplomat