Iran spent decades constructing underground bunkers to shield its vast missile arsenal from destruction. Less than a week into the war with its two most powerful adversaries, the strategy is beginning to look like a blunder. U.S. and Israeli war planes and armed drones are circling over the dozens of cavernous bases, striking missile-carrying launchers when they emerge to fire. Meanwhile, waves of heavy bombers have dropped munitions on the sites, apparently entombing the Iranian weapons below ground in some locations.
Satellite imagery taken in recent days shows the smoldering remains of several
Iranian missiles and launchers destroyed in U.S. and Israeli airstrikes near entrances to the “missile cities,” as Iranian officials call the subterranean sites.
Tehran managed to shoot more than 500 missiles at Israel, at U.S. bases and at other targets in the Persian Gulf region since the conflict began this past Saturday, although many have been intercepted, according to governments in the region. There have been fewer large salvos since the first days of the conflict, a sign that the U.S.-Israeli attacks are degrading Tehran’s ability to strike back.
“We’re hunting Iran’s last remaining ballistic missile launchers to eliminate what I would characterize as their lingering ballistic missile capability,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in a video briefing Tuesday. “We’re seeing Iran’s ability to hit us and our partners is declining.”
Tehran appears to have moved some of its missiles and truck launchers out of the bunkers before the war began, hoping to protect them from attack by dispersing them. Cooper said the U.S. and Israel have destroyed hundreds of missiles, launchers and drones. U.S. Central Command, which is conducting the air campaign, said Wednesday that Iran’s missile launches have dropped 86% in four days.
Analysts said it is likely that much of Tehran’s remaining stockpile of thousands of medium- and short-range missiles remains in underground bases whose locations are mostly known to the U.S. and Israeli militaries.
That underscores a fundamental flaw in the missile-city concept: “What was once mobile and difficult to find is no longer mobile, and easier to hit,” said Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research organization in Monterey, Calif.
With Iranian air-defense batteries largely neutralized, the U.S. and Israel are keeping slow-moving surveillance aircraft flying over known missile bases in some locations—and only attacking, using manned jet fighters or with armed drones, when they see signs of activity, analysts said.
A cluster of bases near the southern city of Shiraz appears to have been struck several times, according to analysts. Commercial-satellite photos released by the Martin Center show mobile missile launchers that had apparently exited one of the underground sites into a nearby canyon were destroyed before firing their missiles. A March 2 satellite image of Shiraz, three days into the war, showed a reddish plume near one of the demolished launchers, indicating that nitric acid fuel was leaking from a missile. Several other launchers were destroyed, igniting a fire that appeared to have spread through the canyon, according to Lair.
At a base near Isfahan, a satellite on March 1 captured a photo of an undamaged missile launcher, apparently moving down the road near the facility. A crater in the road nearby suggested a U.S. or Israeli warplane tried to strike the vehicle but missed, said Lair. A photo of the same site the following day revealed evidence of later heavy bombing of several entrances to the underground facility. Debris “from bunker buster munitions can be seen around both sets of tunnel entrances,” Lair said in a social-media post. “Whether the entrances collapsed is unclear.” The entrance and nearby roads to an Iranian base near Kermanshah appeared to have been struck by heavy U.S. bombs, according to Lair, citing a March 3 photo by Planet, a commercial satellite imagery company.
Iran is continuing to attack using
armed drones and sporadic missile launches.
It might be holding back some of its most powerful and longest-range missiles for use as a last resort if the regime appears in imminent danger of falling. “No one can count their arsenal, which means there’s a lot of uncertainty about how long they can last, which helps them,” said Decker Eveleth, a research analyst with CNA Corp., a Washington, D.C.-area think tank.
Tehran decentralized authority for firing missiles to prevent U.S. and Israeli strikes on its military and political leadership from crippling its ability to respond. Iranian commanders have said they can quickly replace destroyed missiles by building more, though adding additional launchers is more difficult. Almost all of the dozens of missile bases are underground but have aboveground buildings, roads and entrances that make it possible to identify them from satellite photos, áccording to analysts. The Pentagon and Israel’s military have spent years locating the facilities.
U.S. air attacks appear to be focusing on bases in southern Iran, while Israeli warplanes are mostly striking facilities in the north, analysts said. The tunnel entrance to an underground missile base north of the Iranian city of Tabriz, which was visible in satellite photos taken last month, appeared to be collapsed in a March 1 photo, a sign that the facility had been targeted in airstrikes. Tunnel entrances at another site near Tabriz were damaged, a Planet image released by the Martin Center showed. Three other missile bases in southern Iran, near the towns of Khorgo, Haji Abad and Jam, have also been hit, according to analysts.
The decision to attack surface targets reflects both the large numbers of Iranian sites as well as the limited availability of bunker-busting bombs in the U.S. arsenal that could penetrate beneath the surface and destroy the underground facilities, analysts said.
It also highlights the urgency for the Pentagon to knock out Tehran’s missiles early in the conflict, or at least cripple its ability to fire them, before the supply of air-defense interceptors for knocking down incoming Iranian missiles is exhausted.
“These attacks are being carried out in waves, where they destroy two or three targets at a time,” said Colin David, a former U.S. Army missile specialist and a researcher with Alma. “After multiple waves, the bases lose their effectiveness due to the loss of surface structures and launchers.”
Separating fact from fiction about the missile cities has always been difficult.
Iran released video footage in March 2025 of what it claimed was its latest large underground facility, showing senior commanders touring long, windowless corridors filled with missile-carrying trucks. The video didn’t name the location.
At some bases, Tehran has built crude underground silos for firing missiles without having to bring them into the open. A base in southern Iran near the town of Khormuj is believed to have nine underground silos for firing missiles without bringing them to the surface, according to David. Primitive by U.S. standards, the silos are little more than deep holes dug into the side of a mountain that point toward the nearby Persian Gulf, flanking a paved entrance to the underground facility. It is believed that Khormuj has a mechanical loader for moving missiles into the silos on train tracks, instead of on mobile launchers. Tehran released a video in 2022 showing a facility that resembled Khormuj without identifying the location, David said. It showed a half-dozen upright missiles moving along the tracked carousel in a cavernous tunnel.
But Iran has largely abandoned the idea of firing missiles from underground launch locations, according to Eveleth, owing to the technical difficulties of reusing silos.