17MAR

IRGC: our best missiles are still unused

4 min read

04:31UTC

Iran says it has been spending decade-old stock while keeping newer weapons in reserve — and dares the US to prove otherwise by sailing warships into the Gulf.

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ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

Iran is using claimed modern weapons reserves to deter US escalation, regardless of whether the claim is verifiable.

An IRGC spokesman stated Monday that most missiles fired since 28 February were produced "a decade ago" and that weapons manufactured after the initial US-Israeli strikes remain unused⁠¹. He challenged Trump to send American warships into The Persian Gulf if Iran's military capability has truly been destroyed.

The claim is unverifiable from open sources. But the pattern of Iranian fire over seventeen days offers circumstantial support. Iran's announced shift to warheads exceeding one tonne and the cluster submunitions that penetrated Israeli air defences for the first time last week suggest a deliberate escalation in capability — consistent with drawing selectively from newer inventory while the bulk of salvos use older Shahab and Qiam variants. The Kheibarshekan and Fattah hypersonic systems, both publicly tested before the war, have not appeared in confirmed strike data.

Defence Secretary Hegseth claimed on 13 March that Iranian missile volume was down 90% and drone launches down 95%. Yet Iran fired five salvos at Israel from Sunday night through Monday alone, and the IRGC's 48th wave of Operation True Promise 4 struck targets across the Gulf this same week. Either Iranian production capacity is regenerating faster than US strikes can suppress it, or the pre-war stockpile was deeper than US intelligence assessed. The IRGC's decentralised command structure — 31 autonomous provincial units — means destroying central production facilities does not necessarily eliminate dispersed regional caches.

The challenge to send warships is aimed at a visible gap between American rhetoric and American behaviour. US Navy officials have described Hormuz as a "kill box". No ally has agreed to enter it. Bessent admitted Iranian tankers transit freely. The NPR two-week audit documented 7,600 Israeli strikes in Iran but offered no verified data on missile factory destruction. What the US has hit is documented. What Iran still holds is not. If the IRGC has genuinely rationed its advanced anti-ship inventory — the weapons designed for exactly the scenario it is now daring Washington to test — The Gulf remains a lethal operating environment regardless of what has been destroyed on land.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The US claimed it has destroyed Iran's ability to make weapons. Iran's military responded: the missiles we have been firing are ten years old — our newer, more advanced weapons have not been used yet. This is a classic deterrence signal. Whether true or not, Iran wants the US and Israel to believe the worst is still coming if they escalate further. The claim is credible enough to create genuine doubt. Analysts know Iran has been developing advanced hypersonic missiles — called Kheibarshekan and Fattah — for years. If those are intact and unused, they represent a qualitatively different threat from anything fired so far. Iran's missile facilities are underground and hardened, making factory destruction difficult to verify from the air. Iran is deliberately exploiting that uncertainty to make further US escalation feel too risky.

Deep Analysis

Synthesis

If the Kheibarshekan and Fattah hypersonic inventory is materially intact, the current conflict represents only a first-generation exchange. These systems present a qualitatively different intercept challenge: Kheibarshekan's manoeuvring re-entry vehicle and Fattah's hypersonic glide vehicle are specifically designed to defeat Iron Dome, David's Sling, and Arrow-3 at the terminal phase. An exchange involving these systems against Israeli cities or US regional bases would cross a capability threshold with no established precedent in this conflict. Iran's apparent strategic patience in withholding them signals intent to preserve that threshold as a last-resort deterrent rather than expend it in attritional exchanges — a doctrine mirroring North Korea's graduated capability revelation.

Root Causes

The credibility of the IRGC's claim rests on a genuine structural limitation of battle damage assessment. Iran's missile programme incorporated lessons from the Iran-Iraq War — when surface facilities were systematically destroyed — and has since integrated North Korean expertise in hardened underground tunnel construction. US strike packages can destroy visible surface infrastructure, but assessing damage to tunnel-based production and storage requires ground access or technical intelligence that aerial and satellite imagery cannot reliably provide.

Escalation

The IRGC claim functions as a deterrence signal designed to raise the perceived cost of further US and Israeli strikes on Iranian military infrastructure. The US now faces a binary choice: accept the signal and moderate strikes — validating Iranian deterrence — or escalate to call the bluff, accepting the risk of triggering the very advanced-weapon deployment the prior strikes sought to destroy. The claim is most effective precisely because it cannot be falsified without the escalation that would falsify it.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Iran is deliberately managing escalation signals rather than expending its full arsenal, indicating a calculated strategic posture rather than an existential one.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
If the claim is accurate, Israeli and US regional bases face qualitatively superior strike capability — hypersonic glide vehicles — not yet deployed in this conflict.
Short term · Suggested
Risk
US escalation intended to call Iran's bluff could trigger the very advanced-weapon deployment it sought to prevent through prior strikes.
Short term · Suggested
Precedent
Iran's rationing of advanced inventory while expending older stock mirrors North Korean graduated capability revelation and may become a template for other regional powers facing US military pressure.
Long term · Suggested

Source Landscape

Primary parallel: During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq maintained deliberate strategic ambiguity about its WMD stockpiles — publicly hinting at capabilities it had partially dismantled — to deter Iranian opportunism on its eastern flank even while fighting a US-led coalition. The IRGC claim follows identical logic: asserting reserve capability to suppress escalation regardless of independent verifiability.

Counter-parallel: North Korea's KCNA routinely claims devastating retaliatory capability following US military exercises. Unlike DPRK rhetoric, the IRGC claim is partially testable — analysts can cross-reference observed production rates and strike-pattern telemetry against the claimed inventory split between old and new systems, providing a partial falsifiability that DPRK claims lack.

Why it’s relevant now

Iraq's 1991 ambiguity worked on a limited timescale — suppressing Iranian action during the Gulf War — but ultimately collapsed when inspectors provided clarity. Iran faces the same long-term credibility problem: the deterrence value of the claim erodes as US battle damage assessment improves, creating pressure to use advanced systems before the bluff is called.

Consensus view: The IISS Military Balance 2025 estimated Iran's pre-war Ballistic missile inventory at over 3,000 missiles of varying range. Even at the sustained strike tempo observed since 2 March, the observed volume represents a fraction of total pre-war inventory — making the claim of older-stockpile prioritisation consistent with independent external estimates.

Counter-view: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) arms transfer database suggests Iran's Kheibarshekan production rate — inferred from observed export patterns and component procurement signatures — was approximately 50–80 units per year before the war. If accurate, the 'modern' stockpile is materially limited even if technically intact, and the deterrence claim may significantly overstate deployable hypersonic capacity.

Key tension: Whether the US intelligence community's battle damage assessment actually confirms missile factory destruction — or whether Trump and Bessent's public claims of a 'decimated' manufacturing base outrun what classified assessments have verified — is the critical unknown that determines whether the IRGC's deterrence signal has any operational basis.

First Reported In

Update #38 · Israel enters Lebanon; Hormuz pact fails

Profilenews IRGC· 17 Mar 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Pentagon's 90% claim meets drone barrage

IRGC responded directly to Hegseth's claims of 90% missile degradation by asserting that older stock was expended deliberately and modern systems remain intact.

Occurred 13 Mar 2026

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This Event

IRGC: our best missiles are still unused

If true, US and Israeli assessments of Iranian military degradation are overstated and the attrition calculus of the war shifts. The challenge to send warships directly tests Washington's own narrative of Iranian capability destruction against the Navy's refusal to operate in waters it calls a kill box.

Different Perspectives

Russia

Russia vetoed the same renewal on 17 September, arguing that Britain, France and Germany never validly triggered the snapback that reimposed the pre-2015 UN resolutions. No panel was ever seated under that mandate, so the UN list decays fastest for states that screen against it rather than against the American one.

China

China vetoed renewal of the UN sanctions monitoring mandate on 17 September, arguing that Resolution 2231 terminated on 18 October 2025 and that the Security Council should drop Iran's nuclear file altogether. On that reading there is nothing to monitor, so the sanctions survive and their enforcement does not.

Iraq

Baghdad saw the last American counter-Islamic State troops leave its territory on 30 September, completing a timetable it agreed with Washington in September 2024. Iraqi airspace deconfliction passes to Baghdad, which still has an open inquiry into the Maysan drone launches that has named nobody.

Pakistan

Treasury names Waseem Pasha Tajammal of Rawalpindi as the Cavalier group's chairman and places one of the designated incorporations in Islamabad. QatarEnergy separately told Pakistan that liquefied natural gas cargo cancellations would run through November, so Islamabad carries an enforcement question and a supply gap at once.

Turkey

Treasury named a Cavalier Dynamics company incorporated in Istanbul among the ten nodes it designated on 29 September, and Ankara has published no response. Turkey imported a record 120,000 barrels a day of Indian diesel in August, cutting Russia's share of its diesel imports to 20 per cent.

India

Suraj Yadav, a wiper from Uttar Pradesh, was killed aboard the Cape Dao on 23 September, and 19 of the ship's 20 Indian crew were taken off alive. India's September imports ran at 575,000 barrels a day from Iraq and 566,000 from Saudi Arabia, back to pre-conflict rates.