U.S. and Israeli air strikes are targeting launch devices and bunker entrances, gradually destroying Iran's underground missile arsenal. Iran has spent decades building underground bunkers to protect its vast missile arsenal from destruction. Less than a week into the war with its two most powerful opponents, however, the strategy is beginning to look like a misguided move.
US military and Israeli fighter planes and armed drones are hovering over dozens of giant cave bases. Once the launcher carrying the missile leaves the bunker and prepares to launch, it will be hit. At the same time, multiple waves of heavy bombers dropped munitions on these locations, directly burying Iranian weapons underground in some areas.
Recent satellite images show that near the entrance to what Iranian officials call "Missile City", multiple Iranian missiles and launchers were destroyed in U.S. and Israeli air strikes, and the wreckage is still smoking.
Governments in the region say Tehran has fired more than 500 missiles at Israel, U.S. military bases and other targets in the Persian Gulf since the conflict broke out on Saturday, although many of them were intercepted. After the early stages of the conflict, large-scale salvos dropped significantly, suggesting that U.S.-Israeli strikes are weakening Iran's ability to fight back.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in a video briefing on Tuesday:
"We are hunting down Iran's remaining ballistic missile launchers and eliminating what I call its remaining ballistic missile capabilities. We are seeing a decline in Iran's ability to strike us and our partners."
Tehran seems to have moved some of its missiles and vehicle-mounted launchers out of bunkers before the war began, trying to avoid strikes through dispersed deployment. Cooper said that the United States and Israel have destroyed hundreds of missiles, launchers and drones.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees air operations, said Wednesday that Iranian missile launches fell 86% in four days.
Analysts say that most of Iran's thousands of medium- and short-range missiles may still remain in underground bases, and the locations of these bases are mostly known to the US and Israeli forces.
This highlights a fundamental flaw in the Missile City concept.
Sam Lyle, a researcher at the James Martin Nonproliferation Research Center in Monterey, California, said: "Weapons that were originally mobile and difficult to detect are now no longer mobile and are instead easier to hit."
Analysts said that Iran's air defense system has basically failed, allowing the United States and Israel to continue to hover low-speed reconnaissance aircraft over known missile bases. Once signs of activity are detected, they will immediately send manned fighter jets or drones to launch attacks.
According to analysis, multiple bases near the southern city of Shiraz have been hit multiple times. Commercial satellite photos released by the Martin Center showed that multiple mobile missile launchers drove out of an underground base into a nearby canyon and were destroyed before they were launched.
Lyle said that satellite images of Shiraz on March 2 (the third day of the war) showed a red smoke column near a destroyed launcher, indicating that nitric acid fuel in the missile was leaking; several other launchers were destroyed, and the fire seemed to spread throughout the canyon.
At a base near Isfahan, satellite footage captured a intact missile launcher moving on the road near the base on March 1. Lyle said the craters on the roadside indicated that U.S. and Israeli warplanes had tried to strike but missed.
Photos from the same location the next day showed that multiple entrances to the underground base were subsequently heavily bombed.
Lyle posted on social media: "The remains of 'bunker blasters' can be seen around the entrances of both sets of tunnels. It is not clear whether the entrances collapsed."
Citing photos from commercial satellite company Planet on March 3, Lyle said the entrance to an Iranian base near Kermanshah and surrounding roads were suspected to have been hit by heavy bombs from the US military.
Iran continues to launch attacks using armed drones and sporadic missiles.
If the regime is in danger of collapse, it may retain some of its most powerful and longest-range missiles as a last resort.
Decker Eveleth, a researcher at the Washington think tank CNA, said:
"No one can count their inventories, which means there's a lot of uncertainty about how long they'll last, which works to their advantage."
Tehran has delegated missile launch authority to prevent the United States and Israel from attacking high-level military and political officials and paralyzing its counterattack capabilities. Iranian commanders say they can quickly replenish destroyed missiles through mass production, although replenishing launchers is more difficult.
Analysts say that Iran's dozens of missile bases are almost all located underground, but they all have above-ground buildings, roads and entrances that can be identified from satellite photos. The Pentagon and the Israeli military have been locating these facilities for years.
According to analysis, US air strikes are mainly concentrated in southern Iran, while Israeli warplanes mainly attack facilities in the north.
The tunnel entrance to an underground missile base north of the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz, clearly visible in satellite photos last month, appeared to have collapsed in the March 1 photo, indicating that the facility had been hit by an airstrike. Planet satellite images released by the Martin Center showed damage to a tunnel entrance at another base near Tabriz.
Three other missile bases near the towns of Horgo, Hajiabad and Jam in southern Iran were also hit.
Analysts said that the United States chose to attack ground targets, on the one hand because of the large number of Iranian bases, and on the other hand because of the limited number of ground-penetrating bombs in the U.S. military's arsenal that can penetrate underground and destroy bunkers.
This also highlights the urgency of the Pentagon: it must destroy Iranian missiles as soon as possible, or at least paralyze their launch capabilities, before the anti-aircraft interceptors to intercept Iranian missiles are exhausted.
Colin David, a former U.S. Army missile expert and researcher at the Alma Institute, said:
"These attacks are carried out in waves, destroying two or three targets each time. After multiple rounds of strikes, the base will lose its combat capability due to the loss of ground facilities and launchers."
It has been difficult for the outside world to distinguish between true and false information about Missile City.
Iran released a video in March 2025 of what it claimed was its latest large underground base, showing senior military officers inspecting a narrow, windowless corridor filled with missile carriers, but the location was not disclosed.
In some bases, Tehran has built simple underground launch silos, which can launch missiles without moving them out of the ground. A base near Hormoj in southern Iran is believed to have nine such underground silos, David said. Primitive by American standards, the silos are simply deep holes dug into the side of the mountain, facing the nearby Persian Gulf, on either side of the paved entrance to the underground base.
It is believed that the Hormudj base uses rail-mounted mechanical loading equipment to deliver missiles into the silo, rather than relying on mobile launch vehicles. David said that Iran released a video of a facility similar to Hormoj in 2022, but did not indicate the location. It showed multiple upright missiles moving along a track turntable in a giant tunnel.
However, Eveleth said that due to technical difficulties in reusing silos, Iran has basically abandoned the mode of launching missiles directly from underground.