Iran’s attempted missile attack on Friday on a joint U.S.-British military base in the Indian Ocean, 2,500 miles away, immediately prompted questions of how far Tehran’s weapons can reach.
Before the current war on Iran, President Trump raised similar fears, noting in his State of the Union address that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
But for now, Iran’s missiles cannot reach the United States, and as the failed strike on the military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean demonstrated, the farther Iran fires, the less reliable its missiles and the less accurate its attacks become.
Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. One failed mid-flight and the other was shot down by an American warship. The official added that the launch had surprised the United States because of its range.
The strike came before the announcement that Britain would allow the United States expanded use of its bases, including at Diego Garcia. A senior Western military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack may indicate that Iran is trying to force the United States to spread out its defenses, and not merely focus on defending bases in the Middle East.
Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the 2,500-mile distance was “beyond what we and they usually advertise” as the range of Iranian missiles.
“Iran has made its missile program a top priority for many years, and have displayed solid rocket motor plans,” Mr. Karako said. “It’s not a surprise that hard work yielded more substantial capability than some of the more optimistic publicly stated estimates. This is one reason why the United States and our European friends have been deploying missile defenses for quite a while now.”
The United States has missile-defense facilities in Romania and Poland that are nominally meant to address the threat of Iranian missiles.
A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year concluded that Iran did not have ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, and that it might take as long as a decade for it to have up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
At a Senate hearing this week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, affirmed the D.I.A. report that suggested Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile development was years away.
But others have estimated a shorter timeline.
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he feared Iran could make a functioning ICBM in six months if it paired its space launch technology with its medium-range missile technology.
John Ratcliffe, the director of the C.I.A., said Mr. Cotton was right to be concerned. He said if Iran was unimpeded it would be able to develop missiles that could threaten the continental United States, though he did not cite a time frame for such a development.
“It is one of the reasons why degrading Iran’s missile production capabilities that is taking place right now in Operation Epic Fury is so important to our national security,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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