Iran’s ballistic missiles and OWA UAVs
Douglas Barrie
Tehran’s stock of close, short, medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles was a central pillar of its deterrence strategy. However, this strategy was found wanting when faced with the aerial onslaught by Israel and the United States.
Iran expended a significant element of its medium- and intermediate-range ballistic-missile inventory during the Twelve-Day War in June 2025. The extent to which it was able to replace these missiles in the interim would have depended on its ability to repair damaged manufacturing facilities and secure the raw materials for propellant manufacture.
Despite this, however, Iran may have so far launched over 700+ ballistic missiles, with Israel and the United Arab Emirates the recipients of most attention. Ground-based air defence was used in both countries to intercept nearly all the missiles. In the UAE, the Ministry of Defence said on 1 March 2026 that since the beginning of the Israeli and US attacks, it had engaged 165 ballistic missiles. Two days later, this figure had grown only to 186, of which 172 were engaged, 13 fell in the sea and one impacted the UAE. By 4 March, the total was 189, and by 9 March it had reached 253, of which only two had struck UAE territory.
Iran’s ability to use its ballistic-missile inventory has been degraded by sustained Israeli and US airstrikes on known storage and deployment locations, with some missiles destroyed while in the launch position on transporter erector launchers (TEL). Tehran may have had up to 400 TELs for its ballistic missiles, and their destruction is in some ways more damaging than a missile interception. A key intelligence target for Israel and the US will have been to establish an assessment of Tehran’s remaining stockpile of ballistic missiles, particularly the longer-range systems.
There has also been renewed suggestion that Tehran seeks a far longer-range missile capability, a notion identified by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2025, which speculated that by 2035 Iran could have 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). Such a programme would, in part, build on space-launch vehicle developments already under way. The DIA caveated this assessment, however, by noting this was only ‘should Tehran decide to pursue the [ICBM] capability’.
Iran is also carrying out one-way-attack uninhabited-aerial-vehicle (OWA UAV) strikes, likely mainly using the Shahed 136, alongside the ballistic-missile attacks, as well as a hitherto smaller number of cruise-missile launches, including a version of the Paveh. OWA UAVshave been fired in larger numbers than ballistic missiles. In the case of attacks on the UAE, as of 9 March, it had faced around five times more OWA UAVs than ballistic missiles, with 1,440 detected, of which just under 6% struck the country and 94% were intercepted, according to the MoD.
The US strategic context: new Iran, new Middle East
John Raine
The United States has reserved a special, bipartisan animus for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership in Tehran, which administrations have tempered from time to time but have never been able to move beyond. The containment of the regime through sanctions and counter-action has been a consistent strategic and emotive objective across administrations. Under President Donald Trump the objective has been upgraded from containment to removal. While many of his predecessors have wished it, none have avowed it as a strategy or a war aim.
But for the Trump administration there is also a broader strategic context into which regime change fits.
With the dislodging of the Assads in Syria, the current leadership and political system in Iran constitute the last remaining state-level obstacle to Trump’s vision of a region in which sectarian and political militancy are subordinated to market-based economic development. Iran is the final bastion of sectarian and political militancy not only because of the political philosophy of the regime itself and its sprawling security apparatus, but also because of the multiple actors it has sponsored in the region and beyond.
Key to Trump’s vision of the region is the inclusion of Israel as a partner and peer. Ideally the regional conversation will be with, not about, Israel. But the Iranian leadership remains viscerally opposed to Israel’s existence, let alone inclusion, and has been a rallying point, or a predator, of similar sentiment across the Arab Middle East. Removing the regime would remove one – but by no means all – of the centres of opposition to the reintegration of Israel and, most important for the president, to the consolidation of his Abraham Accords system.
A new regime free of sanctions would open up the reintegration of Iran’s huge oil and gas reserves into the global economy. Iran could be ‘redollarised’ by selling its hydrocarbons in recyclable dollars. That would support the Trump administration’s ideal of ‘energy abundance’ and open up opportunities in exploration and extraction in which the US is a leader. Iran would then become a booster for the US economy, not a drag on it.
Regime removal would offer a deeper level of assurance on regional security and the critical seaway, the Strait of Hormuz, than the US could ever have done without intervening militarily – and deeper too than the assurance any bilateral treaties between Gulf countries and Iran can provide. Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all seen non-interference agreements with Iran, written or not, violated since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury. With the ayatollahs removed, Trump would be free to wind down regional US defence commitments.
And it would remove a bridgehead in the region for Russia, militarily, and China, economically, and open the way for the US, with or without its allies, to take their place.
But although regime change fits administration strategy, it is a risk for the president. It may, depending on the course of the conflict, undermine his commitment to keep the US out of prolonged armed conflicts and a personal commitment to be celebrated for peace deals rather than wars. But a sense of ‘tide and time’, a success – by his lights – in Venezuela with the removal of Nicolás Maduro, and probably the advocacy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have made him gamble that the best way to make history in the Middle East is to force it.
Pakistan’s tightrope
Antoine Levesques
As a result of the war that began on 28 February with the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, Pakistan is being forced to perform an increasingly delicate balancing act that is testing the famed resilience of its diplomacy and economy. Its normally balanced foreign policy is now under greater strain than when widespread protests rocked Iran in January.
The country is now committed to the mutual-defence agreement it signed with US ally Saudi Arabia in September 2025, although many of its details remain unknown. (It is worth noting that Iran initially welcomed this agreement, seeing it as reflecting a united stance against Israel.) Islamabad and Riyadh have a trust-based relationship. Field Marshal Asim Munir’s 7 March meeting with Mohammed Bin Salman in Riyadh underscores Pakistan’s status for Saudi Arabia as a high-priority partner. Saudi Arabia’s leverage is its ability to help Pakistan weather economic hardship arising from the Iran conflict – which includes stemming rising energy prices through a long-standing bilateral oil facility, along with well-documented early- and late-resort macroeconomic support.
Pakistan has no interest in antagonising Iran, its contiguous neighbour. Islamabad condemned the killing of Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei as a breach of international law, echoing its disapproval of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran in June last year. Since Khamenei’s elimination, people have been killed in incidents across Pakistan involving Shia protesters. Iran has significant influence over Pakistan’s Shia minority, which is the world’s largest Shia population outside Iran itself. Pakistan’s ties to Iran were on display when Munir last visited Tehran, in May 2025. The 2024 ban on the Zainabiyoun Brigade, a Shia militia, only partially addressed the presence in Pakistan of potentially hundreds of fighters with experience of fighting against Islamic State in Syria. Against a backdrop of localised sectarian violence, including a recent bombing in Islamabad, the security forces have stepped up their vigilance.
With the US, Pakistan also has limited leeway. In September 2025 in Washington, the conspicuous display of warmth at leader level perhaps surprised officials in both countries, who are accustomed to a transactional relationship. Shared counter-terrorism, stability, maritime-security and mining interests have anchored the relationship since the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan joined the US Board of Peace in February, although it did so ‘prudently’.
Pakistan’s hypothetical ability to provide military assistance to the Gulf countries, starting with Saudi Arabia, is diminished by its armed forces’ ongoing and unprecedented military operations to quell the Taliban threat on the country’s western border. Before last year’s ceasefire, Pakistan had been somewhat ambiguous in its statements towards the Afghan Taliban, which Islamabad resents for providing sanctuary to the Pakistani Taliban, but the recent airstrikes, including in Kabul and Kandahar, were intended to convey Pakistani preparedness to escalate its coercion.
Pakistan is also maintaining a robust conventional military posture towards India. The two countries fought an unprecedented 88-hour air war in May last year, and India said its deter-and-punish military operation has only been put on pause. It therefore remains the case that most of Pakistan’s conventional capabilities – particularly in the air domain, including its air defences – may need to be employed against its traditional adversary.
Should Saudi Arabia abandon its current position of restraint towards Iran, Pakistan could be forced to side more resolutely with it, abandoning the broker role that it is comfortable with. Any tilt towards Saudi Arabia would initially be political and diplomatic, as implied by the veiled warning delivered on 28 February by Pakistan’s foreign minister Ishaq Dar in a conversation with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi. Pakistan would probably want any military involvement to be enabling and scalable, either upwards and downwards, so as potentially to respond to the reactions it would provoke in Riyadh and Tehran.
As for Pakistan’s highly valued relations with China, they could exercise a moderating influence over any shift in foreign policy. In 2023 China encouraged the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, and in 2024 it urged Pakistan to overcome tensions with Iran after the two countries exchanged unprecedented missile fire across their shared border. Against the backdrop of the current conflict, Islamabad is likely to avoid doing anything that would embarrass its ‘all weather’ partner, Beijing.
