In contemporary warfare, the concept of “pinpoint” missile accuracy tends to outpace reality. It warms the hearts of defense bureaucracies and producers alike to speak in dramatic terms—30-meter CEPs, surgical strikes, precision-guided everything—but in practicality, reality is considerably grubbier. This is best illustrated when one examines the performance of Iranian ballistic missiles.
To grasp the limits, it’s helpful to define what CEP—circular error probable—measures. It’s a statistical circle around which half of a missile’s shots are likely to fall. It’s not a guarantee that every shot will hit that area, nor does it factor in the unpredictable mess of combat. As examples from studies of the Nevatim Air Force base strike, most touted CEPs are calculated from perfect test environments, not the complicated facts of war.
Even the Pershing 2, once hailed for its claimed 30-meter CEP, never consistently did it in the field, with failures and partial successes in between. The message is unmistakable: marketing numbers tend to exaggerate performance under actual conditions.
The Israeli Nevatim strike offered a rare opportunity to inspect Iranian missile accuracy in combat. In the attack, Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at three Israeli sites, with Nevatim bearing the brunt. Plotting the hits showed that Iranian missiles are considerably less accurate than usually supposed. Computed CEPs varied between about 800 and 900 meters, and even the best-case scenarios weren’t below 500 meters. This is not a slight error—it’s an order of magnitude from the precision required to safely strike hard targets like hardened military shelters.
This has significant implications. The chances of a single Iranian missile knocking out a hardened shelter, like ones for F-35 aircraft, are effectively zero. At a 900-meter CEP, the probability of striking a 10-meter target is less than 0.01%.
At even a 600-meter CEP, it’s still only about 0.03%. Iran’s missile force can, in real terms, threaten big, soft targets—cities, government centers, or close-packed bases—but is not reliably able to destroy dispersed, hardened military resources. Traditional and planning Israeli forces remain mostly safe from accurate Iranian missile strikes unless the aggressors significantly increase numbers or accuracy.
Accuracy is just half the equation. Electronic warfare is increasingly determining the outcome of missile defense battles. There are reports that Israel has employed GNSS spoofing—providing misleading navigation data to incoming missiles—prompting several Iranian missiles to be directed off course and crash harmlessly into the Mediterranean.
It differs from conventional jamming in that spoofing imitates legitimate signals, rendering them more difficult to find and neutralize. Performing it effectively calls for a detailed comprehension of missile guidance algorithms, defining a new domain in missile defense that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in GNSS-based navigation.
The consequences are dramatic. So long as Iran continues to depend on GNSS and inertial navigation, its missiles continue to be susceptible to electronic interference, lowering their already low precision. Missiles with optical or radar seekers can shoot better, but the majority of Iran’s arsenal does not have that capability. This puts a tough cap on the military value of their missile forces. They can credibly threaten civilian populations and induce political pressure, but they cannot consistently hit hardened, strategically important targets.
This dynamic creates a strategic paradox. Israel won’t likely escalate to a nuclear response against conventional missile attacks, and Iran’s missiles are too inexact to deter conventional Israeli responses. What this leaves is a tit-for-tat cycle of exchanges with limited potential for game-ending escalation—unless Iran becomes able to launch missiles with genuine counterforce precision.
For Iran, breaking this equation would take breakthroughs: much more stringent CEPs, electronic warfare-immune guidance systems, and the capability to hit dispersed, hardened targets. Until improvements are made along these lines, the boundaries of missile accuracy and the increasing sophistication of electronic countermeasures keep Iran’s missile force firmly in the purview of psychological and political means, not a battlefield game-changer.
