Iran Deploys Warships With 600 Km Range Missiles on Board During Snap Gulf Drills

Only two days earlier, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif dropped hints about the Islamic Republic’s plans to unveil “new strategic systems and capabilities” for maritime defense.

Iran deployed warships Wednesday fitted with missiles with a 600 km range to ensure the security of the country’s Persian Gulf islands amid snap maritime drills.

“In this exercise, the vessels of the ‘Shahid Hojaji Special Unit’ armed with long-range missiles that can fly 600 km were present to defend the Island,” IRGC Navy commander Ali Azmaei said, referring to surprise exercises off an Iranian-administered Gulf island which is also claimed by the United Arab Emirates.

The commander further said that a standout feature of the drills was the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and naval drones equipped with “advanced artificial intelligence.”

The IRGC said the exercises were aimed at “displaying the IRGC Navy’s might, as well as combat and defense preparedness in protecting Persian Gulf security and Iranian islands,” and that the drills involved a host of naval and airborne forces, missiles, drones, electronic warfare units, and supported by the IRGC’s Aerospace Force.

Azmaei did not offer any additional details on the long-range warship-based missiles deployed in the drills, but indicated that IRGC forces had deployed Fath and Qadir missile systems on the islands. The Fath, also known as the Fath-360, is a new ground-launched satellite-guided tactical missile first unveiled at a military parade in 2022, and features a 150 kg warhead and effective firing range of between 30 and 120 km. The Qadir, also spelled "Qader" or "Ghader," is a coastal defense anti-ship cruise missile with a 330 km range and a 200 kg warhead.

“The Iranian nation will respond to all seditions and hostilities on the spot and in such a way that [enemies] will regret their actions,” IRGC Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami said on the sidelines of the exercises.

“Muslim nations and governments of this region are capable of ensuring the security of all regions with brotherly and Muslim-style arrangements, and there is no need for the presence of any outsiders,” Salami added.

The IRGC Navy has spent decades patrolling the nation’s long coastlines and Gulf islands, and bases its strategy on the principles of asymmetric warfare, lining up an array of missile, rocket and machinegun-armed speedboats, coastal defense batteries, and small surface warships against far larger and more costly enemy forces, including US naval strike groups which are regularly deployed in the region.

Iran enjoys one of the highest rates of defense industry self-sufficiency anywhere in the Middle East, and has fielded dozens of new, domestically developed missiles and drones going back to the 1980s, when the country was slapped with restrictions from its traditional Western arms sellers during the Iran-Iraq War.

The Islamic Republic has a broad array of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles in its arsenal, including more than a dozen with a range of 600 km or more. These include the new Paveh cruise missile, which has a range of 1,650 km, and the Abu Mahdi anti-ship missile, introduced last month, which has a range of over 1,000 km.

In addition to carrying missiles on specially-designed ship-based platforms, Iran is known to deploy mobile, vehicle-based missile platforms and air defense systems on roll-on/roll-off vessels such as the IRIS Makran, a 121,000 ton forward base ship operated by the Iranian Navy, built from a converted tanker. Therefore, until and unless Iran provides additional information on the 600 km range missiles deployed during Wednesday’s drills, it will be anyone’s guess whether these are fundamentally new systems or modifications of an existing missile.