I try not to make this a news feed or to sensationalise things very much. But, the attempted missile attack on Diego Garcia is the most significant development of the war so far, even more so that the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
In case you haven’t seen, Iran fired two ballistic missiles at the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia. The news broke last night, but it sounds like this actually happened a few days ago (and so not in response to the UK extending what the US can use UK bases for yesterday). This is a big deal because no one thought that the Iranians had missiles that could go this far.
Before yesterday, the longest range Iranian missile that we publicly knew of was the Khorramshahr-4, which had enough range to hit targets within 2000km of Iran. As the graphic below shows, that limited the theatre of war broadly to the Middle East and the most Eastern parts of Europe.
But Diego Garcia is much further away, closer to c.4000km away from Iran, as shown by the red pin on the map below:
Now this is a big deal because it extends the potential theatre of war beyond the Middle East to much of Europe. As a rough estimate, this could be mean that Iranian missiles could reach Rome and Berlin, as well as the Ramstein US Air Force base in Germany, as shown below.
Now there’s been no indication that the missiles actually reached Diego Garcia, and so the Iranian missile capability might not be as sophisticated as the attack might initially suggest - one seems to have malfunctioned en-route and the US seems to have shot one down.
But it does raise the question of what else they’ve got up their sleeves. After all, no one thought they could go much further than 2000km, and so if they can actually go closer to 4000km, who knows what else they can do? Lots of estimates are suggesting that the same capability that was used on Diego Garcia could also be used to hit targets in the UK, including London - although that does seem a little far based on what we know right now.
Now I don’t want to be doomsday-y here, but if that was to happen, we don’t have the missile defences to stop a missile attack over London. The only assets the UK has to blow these things out of the sky are Type 45 destroyers. We have six - one (HMS Dragon) is in the Mediterranean, on its way to help defend Cyprus. Two are in short-term retrofits and could be ready in a week, and the other three are in long-term repair. That doesn’t leave any free for UK homeland defence.
The other alternative to shoot these things down are ground based missile defences, like the Patriot or THAAD systems we’ve seen used across the Gulf. The UK doesn’t have any of those though, and so we’d be reliant on the US and broader NATO allies, which are in place across Europe, most notably at Ramstein Air Base in Germany (which is the European headquarters for the US Air Force). These missiles would have to fly over Europe and so the idea of them getting intercepted as they travel through allied airspace isn’t that unreasonable, but it does leave you at the mercy of your NATO allies.
This doesn’t give much credence to Trump’s claims that Iran’s missile capability has been completely degraded as a result of US/Israeli air strikes, nor that the war is nearly won.
It’s also important to note that the air defences the US and Gulf countries are using are very expensive and take a long time to replenish after you’ve fired them. In contrast, Iran’s Shahed drones and attack capabilities cost much less and they can produce new ones a lot faster, which means eventually we’ll reach a point where the air defences are spent, but Iran’s attack vehicles keep coming.
There’s been some learning from Ukraine in this respect, with cheaper interceptor drones beginning to be used in the region, as well as a British Army counter-UAV team which seem to have been very busy. As the war continues, there’ll need to be a greater shift to implementing the lessons from Ukraine over the cities of the Gulf.
Over time, this could extend to much of Western Europe as well.
RH