Why Iran’s Use of Multi-Warhead Missiles Caused Significant Issues for Israeli Air Defences

Following Israel’s initiation of open hostilities with Iran on June 13, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched increasingly powerful missile attacks against a range of Israeli targets, with both sides escalating attacks on one another’s military facilities and key infrastructure over an 11 day period. On June 23 during the 21st wave of Iranian missile attacks, the Revolutionary Guard for the first time launched a multiple warhead ballistic missile against Israeli targets, marking a major landmark in the escalation of strikes. This followed the first combat use of Iran’s first ballistic missile class equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, the Fattah, on June 18. Where the Fattah challenged Israeli air defences due to the near impossibility of intercepting it, with strikes launched at speeds of Mach 13-15, missiles with multiple warheads pose a potentially greater threat due to their ability to hit a range of targets with a single strike, while more cost effectively depleting Israel’s already increasingly strained anti-ballistic missile arsenal.

Iran’s sole ballistic missile class known to have been equipped with multiple warheads is the Kheibar Shekan, which although being an older design that takes longer to prepare for launch, benefits from a particularly large payload capacity allowing it to accommodate these warheads. Although it remains uncertain whether the warheads have independent targeting capabilities,Iranian sources claim that the multiple warheads each benefit from a degree of precision guidance, allowing them to strike key sites which have included Ben Gurion Airport, a major biological research centre, and multiple military command hubs. Despite strict censorship of footage of the ballistic missile attacks in Israel, the footage that has been released has confirmed considerable accuracy from prior missile attacks, raising the possibly that missiles using multiple warheads may have the same capability. Although missiles with multiple warheads have since the 1970s been widely operationalised for intercontinental range strikes, with the large majority of ICBMs being configured with such payloads, the development of medium range missiles with such payloads has relatively few precedents. As China, Russia and North Korea all continue to invest in enhancing their medium and intermediate range ballistic missile arsenals, the benefits of such missiles are likely to be evaluated based on studies of Iran’s wartime use of the Kheibar Shekan.