IMINT: Iran’s Strike on Nevatim Airbase

IMINT: Iran’s Strike on Nevatim Airbase

By Decker Eveleth    October 4, 2024

On October 1st, Iran launched another ballistic missile attack on Israel, and unlike last time, this time a large number of Iranian ballistic missile systems appear to have impacted various target areas in Israel. Here is what we know so far: Iran launched around 180 ballistic missiles, and this time they used some of their most advanced designs. Unlike the strikes in April, which appear to have been conducted mainly using older, liquid-fueled Scud derivatives like the Emad missile, Iran launched a large number of their more modern solid-fueled systems as well. My former colleague Sam Lair over at CNS has been going around looking at Iranian missile bases for evidence of launches, and so far we know that Iran launched solid-fueled missiles from several bases including Tabriz and liquid-fueled missiles from their missile base in Shiraz. The targets, according to Iran, included various Israeli air defense radar installations, two airbases (Nevatim Airbase and Tel Nof Airbase) and Mossad headquarters in Glilot. Of these it seems the strike on Mossad headquarters in Glilot was the least successful. We only saw two impacts, and the one impact that landed even remotely near the headquarters building did so about 520 meters away from the building itself.

The strikes at Tel Nof and Nevatim seem to have been much more successful. We don’t have imagery of Tel Nof yet, but there is social media footage of warheads raining down on the base, and some seemed to have caused secondary explosions, which is good evidence that they likely hit something worth hitting. As soon as we have imagery of Tel Nof myself and the crew at CNS will start counting.

We got some high resolution imagery of one of the targets, Nevatim Air Base, that our friends at Planet Labs snapped on October 2nd. Its worth talking about the imagery at length. Yesterday Jeffrey, his crew over at CNS, and myself conducted a battle damage assessment on Nevatim Air Base, and we count at least 33 likely impact craters, with likely more impacts currently obscured by clouds. It may shake down that Iran hit the base with something like 40 warheads. Big shout out to Sam Lair, Michael Duitsman, and the rest of the crew for doing some good geospatial work on this problem.

Here’s the image Jeffrey posted. Before going further it’s worth pausing on this for a moment. Last time Iran tried to hit Nevatim back in April, they only got 5 warheads through, and those warheads were pretty spread out and didn’t hit much of interest. I had an argument with Jeffrey at the time about what sort of target points they would be aiming at. Jeffrey, under the reasonable assumption that the liquid-fueled missiles like Emad that Iran uses aren’t that accurate (an assessment I think I agree with) made the argument that likely Iran aimed a single target point. I disagreed with him at the time about the number of target points, and the slightly clustering effect here seems to support the tentative conclusion that Iran probably aimed at multiple points. There is a slight clustering effect at several important targets, like the airborne refueling aircraft hangars and the F-35 shelters. But more data is needed to come to a specific conclusion. It’s possible that Iran aimed at a single aim point back in April, but this time had multiple aim points because they were using different missiles. Iran used more modern systems for this strike – they appear to have used their latest Fattah and Kheibar Shekan missiles, which are solid-fuel and have maneuvering warheads. The Fattah is especially sophisticated as it has a powered warhead. There are some people attempting to use this analysis to claim that Iranian missiles have an accuracy of 500 meters, and I would hold off on that given how much we don’t know about what they targeted.

Another important thing to note is that airbases are really hard targets. The vast majority of an airbase is empty land and most of the things you probably wanna hit are pretty spread out. The Russians didn’t have all that much luck hitting Ukrainian airbases for much the same reason. In order to be very effective at destroying aircraft, you have to be very, very precise, and most missiles simply don’t have that accuracy.

So what did they hit? Well, not much. Most of the impact zones either missed entirely or simply hit the taxiways around the base, most of which has now been repaired. They did score some hits on one refueling aircraft hangar and a couple buildings.

There’s a slight cluster effect in this area where Israeli stores a large number of aircraft unprotected, which again may be an indication that Iran aimed at this area specifically, or Iran simply got very lucky that they had such good cluster in such a high value area.

One support building at the south end of the base took a hit from a missile, but the hit wasn’t centered on the building, and only part of the building was destroyed.

Lastly, the 3 meter imagery shows likely serious damage to a building on the eastern side of the base, likely used for something like maintenance. The damage to those three structures are the most obvious pieces of serious damage Iran’s strike inflicted. From there we move on to the F-35 shelters, which appear to have mainly weathered the storm.

Two near misses here, with impact craters apparent on either side of one of the rows of F-35 shelters. A third hit a little further away off the image. Should demonstrate that the lack of serious damage to the facilities here at Nevatim was as much luck as it was due to the relative inaccuracy of Iranian missiles.

Jeffrey pointed out that one of the F-35 shelters does appear to have sustained some damage, perhaps even a direct hit. There’s what might be a small hole in the roof of the shelter, and a large amount of concrete dust on the roof. But the shelter itself seems to still be intact. It could either be that the warhead that landed here was a dud and didn’t explode or Israeli aircraft shelter construction techniques contain explosions really well. It is notable that this shelter still has its doors closed, unlike most of the other shelters, possibly because its damaged and not in use.

The rest of the impacts did not hit much of anything, and many landed further down the runway. A friend is working on a theory as to why this is that I will talk about next time when its a little fleshed out.

So what does all this tell us? There’s still a lot we don’t know about the overall strike, but I think some data can be pulled from this. We cannot state much about the overall effectiveness of Israeli air defense. We know Israel launched a large number of interceptors, and we can see footage of those interceptors intercepting SOMETHING beyond the atmosphere, but we don’t know how effective they were as a whole system. But the fact remains that over 30 missiles impacted Nevatim, and I don’t think that’s because Israel did not intercept missiles they thought were going to miss. As the imagery of the F-35 shelters show, many of the misses here at Nevatim were only meters away from something worth hitting, and it seems unlikely that Israel can determine the impact points of maneuvering missiles while they are still traveling through the mid-course down to 5 meters.

We also don’t know much about the specific capabilities Iranian missiles have at maneuvering to defeat Israeli missile defense. Perhaps some of the Iranian missiles did manage to bamboozle Israel’s missile defense grid, but without hard data on that, there’s not much we can say.

We also don’t know why Nevatim was hit much harder than Glilot. It’s possible that Israel prioritized intercepting missiles heading for Glilot as Glilot is within an urban area. This if true lends credence to the idea that Israel was either genuinely overwhelmed by missiles, or they simply chose to conserve their interceptors for another day. Both may be true.

Regardless of which may be true or truer than the other, the core fact remains that Iran has proven it can hit Israel hard if it so chose. Airbases are hard targets, and the sort of target that likely won’t produce many casualties. Iran could choose a different target – say, a densely packed IDF ground forces base, or a target within a civilian area – and a missile strike there would produce a large number of causalities.

There’s also the long term conflict problem Israel has now. Interceptors are more expensive than ballistic missiles, and Iran is dramatically expanding their production facilities for ballistic missiles at all three sites they produce missiles at. The disparity between the rate at which Israel can produce interceptors and the rate at which Iran can produce ballistic missiles will likely swing in Iran’s favor, which suggests that Iran could, in a longer missile campaign or a protracted war, simply continually spit missiles at Israel until Israel does not have any interceptors left.

This has always been the enduring problem with missile defense – once you build up a defensive shield and identify the number of missiles you want to intercept, your adversary is going to simply build more missiles. I’ve been convinced that theater missile defense generates off-ramps in conflicts, but this argument only works in conflicts where the actors CAN back away, which is why I still think the argument doesn’t really work at the nuclear strategic level. It also depends on the personality in question at the head of a state wanting to take an off-ramp, and unfortunately, we’re talking about Israel here.

So despite the mockery of Iran’s missile accuracy, my personal takeaway is the opposite of what people seem to be concluding about this whole episode: Iran has proven that its missiles are effective and that they can indeed hurt Israel. No one should be fooled that Iranian missile accuracy (or lack thereof) means the Iranian missile force is some sort of paper tiger. A different target would produce different results. Whether or not Israel will feel deterred by this revelation is another story that depends on the Israeli domestic political climate and the personalities within the Israeli government. Given that Israel seems to have already publicly committed to striking Iran, this is likely not the last time we will see exchanges of missiles. My concern is that this will be, in the long term, an exchange that Israel won’t be able to afford to make if this becomes a protracted conflict⍐.