Iran does not need to beat the US and Israel in a fair fight. It just needs to make sure every fight is expensive, exhausting, and impossible to end cleanly. Two weapons are making that strategy work right now: the missile salvo and the cluster bomb.
What Is a Missile Salvo?
A missile salvo is not complicated. It is a bunch of missiles fired at the same target, at the same time, from multiple locations.
The idea is simple. Every air defense system in the world has a limit. It can track only so many incoming threats at once. It can fire only so many interceptors before it needs to reload. A salvo attack exploits that limit directly. You flood the system with more missiles than it can handle. Some get shot down. The rest get through.
Think of it like trying to swat ten flies at once with one hand. You will get a few. The rest will keep flying.
Iran has turned this into a war doctrine. Analysts call it Anti-Access/Area Denial, or A2/AD. The goal is not necessarily to destroy everything with one strike. The goal is to stretch defenses, burn through expensive interceptor stocks, and keep pressure on the enemy around the clock. From western Iran, a ballistic missile can reach Gulf targets in roughly five to ten minutes. That gives defenders very little time to react. When you fire a hundred missiles in a coordinated wave, the defenders are forced to make instant decisions about which ones to prioritize and which ones to let pass.
Iran used this method as recently as October 2024, when it fired around 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in what analysts from the Institute for the Study of War described as an attack designed to oversaturate Israeli air defenses by concentrating fire on a small geographic area. In the current conflict, since Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, Iran has launched roughly 174 separate waves of missile and drone strikes at Israel as of March 9, according to Hudson Institute tracking data. The Tel Aviv metropolitan area has absorbed more than half of those salvos.
Each interceptor Iran forces Israel and the US to fire costs far more than the incoming threat. A THAAD interceptor runs roughly $11 million. Arrow 3 costs $2 to $3 million per shot. An Iranian Shahed drone costs around $20,000. Iran has studied that math carefully.
What Are Cluster Bombs?
A cluster bomb is a weapon that opens in mid-air and releases dozens of smaller bombs called bomblets, or submunitions, across a wide area.
How Cluster Munitions Work - Bomblets Dispersing on Release
Imagine one missile acting like a spray can. Instead of one explosion at a single point, you get 20, 40, or even 80 small blasts scattered across several square miles. That is exactly what Iran has been doing over Israeli cities in this war.
Most of Iran's ballistic missiles in the current conflict carry around 24 bomblets. Each one weighs up to 11 pounds of explosives. Iran's more advanced Khorramshahr missile can carry up to 80 bomblets per missile, according to defense experts. These are released at altitude, around 23,000 feet, and then rain down over whatever is below.
A CNN analysis of two separate Iranian cluster munition attacks confirmed blast impacts spread across areas of seven to eight miles each, hitting homes, car parks, roads, parks, and businesses at random. That is not precision targeting. That is area coverage, and it is why cluster munitions are banned under international humanitarian law when used in populated areas. Amnesty International flagged Iran's cluster munition use as a violation as far back as the 12-day war in June 2025.
Israel has acknowledged using cluster munitions in past conflicts, including Lebanon in 2006. Neither side has clean hands on this issue. But what is happening right now in Israeli cities is new in scale and strategy.
Iran's Arsenal: Numbers That Matter
Iran has the largest and most varied ballistic missile force in the Middle East. It has built this arsenal over decades, largely because it operates a weak conventional air force running on ageing aircraft. Missiles became the substitute for air power.
Iran's key missiles include the Shahab series, Emad, Ghadr, Zolfaghar, and the Khorramshahr family. The longest-range variants travel between 2,000 and 2,500 kilometers, reaching Israel and US bases across the Gulf.
Critically, Iran has at least five known underground missile cities, built into mountains in provinces including Kermanshah and Semnan. These facilities are hardened against airstrikes. Despite the US and Israel neutralizing roughly 300 Iranian missile launchers since February 28, Iran has kept firing. The underground storage explains why.
Ballistic missiles come fast and high. Cruise missiles fly low and hug terrain. Shahed drones are slow but cheap. Each requires a different defensive response at different altitudes simultaneously. That combination stretches any defense network to its limit.
Why This Is a Headache for the US and Israel
Here is the core problem. Israel has one of the most sophisticated air defense networks ever built. Iron Dome handles short-range rockets. David's Sling covers medium-range threats. Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 target ballistic missiles at high altitude. The US added THAAD batteries before this war began. On paper, this system should stop almost everything.
But cluster munitions break that logic.
An Israeli official said roughly half of all ballistic missiles Iran has fired at Israel during this war have been equipped with cluster munitions. When Iran fires a missile and Israel's Arrow system intercepts it successfully, the problem is not always solved. If the warhead breaks open before the missile is fully destroyed, the bomblets are already released and falling. The Iron Dome can try to intercept them, but the bomblets are small, numerous, and fall fast. There is limited time and limited capacity to stop them all.
Missile defense expert Tal Inbar, who consults for Israeli defense companies, described the cluster warhead as a mechanism to bypass active missile defense. That is the critical phrase. Iran has found a way to make a successful intercept still cause harm on the ground.
On the US side, the pressure is different. Iranian salvos have targeted US military infrastructure directly. Strikes were confirmed against the US Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and the US Embassy compound in Kuwait. Iranian targeting also focused on THAAD radar installations, with imagery from the UAE suggesting Iranian strikes may have caused structural damage to radar sites. Whether those systems were damaged or destroyed remains unclear.
There is also the economic drain. Intercepting missiles is expensive. Replacing interceptor stocks takes time. A sustained salvo campaign depletes defensive capacity. That is the entire point. Not to win a single battle, but to make the enemy burn through money and missiles until the political cost of continuing becomes too high.
The shipping impact shows it is working. Lloyd's List Intelligence data shows no tankers over 10,000 deadweight tons had entered the Gulf westbound since March 3. The Strait of Hormuz carries around 20 percent of global oil supply. Iran's missile threat has effectively frozen a significant portion of that traffic.
Editorial View · Santhosh Vishwamitra
Iran Does Not Need to Win. It Needs to Make This Painful Enough.
The US and Israel went into Operation Epic Fury expecting to destroy Iran's missile program fast. They have destroyed a lot. But Iran is still firing. That alone tells you something about how this war was planned on Iran's side. The missile cities, the cluster warheads, the drone swarms, the coordinated multi-front salvos, these were not improvised responses. They were prepared years in advance for exactly this scenario.
The cluster munition strategy is particularly troubling. It is not about killing soldiers. It is about making 9 million people in Tel Aviv's metropolitan area afraid to step outside after a siren. It is psychological warfare combined with interceptor depletion. Amnesty International has called it a war crime. They are right. But Iran clearly calculated that international condemnation costs less than military defeat. The real question now is how long the US and Israel can sustain the operational and economic cost of this conflict, and whether Iran's leadership, now leaderless at the top, still has the command cohesion to keep its missile forces organized. That is what determines how this ends.
The Bottom Line
Iran has turned budget missiles and cheap drones into a weapon that strains billion-dollar defense systems. The salvo drains interceptors. The cluster warhead bypasses them. Until the US and Israel find a way to destroy Iran's underground launch capacity faster than Iran can rebuild it, this problem does not go away.
Santhosh Vishwamitra
Founder of
Inside Stories. Writes analysis on geopolitics, global power shifts, and international conflict. For web development and writing content, visit
santhoshvishwamitrablog.wordpress.com.
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