Iranian underground missile silos
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Iranian underground missile silos are the target set John Kiriakou uses to explain why the 2026 Iran war could not achieve disarmament from the air. Footage circulating during the war showed Iranian missiles emerging from underground silos in terrain so featureless that nothing on the surface indicated anything was buried beneath it.

Iran announced during the war that future launches would carry warheads exceeding one ton. Kiriakou set that against the American record in Afghanistan: "for twenty years the US failed to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan when all they were hiding in the mountains and in the caves were AK-47s and RPG launchers and hidden weapon caches." His question followed directly, "how are they going to defeat this? We're not talking about RPGs and AK-47s."

The targeting problem

Kiriakou allows that an underground facility can be destroyed from the air, "just like they did with Nasrallah, but you need to know where it is and they don't know where these ones are." He points to the previous year's strike on Iran as evidence of the guesswork involved: a thirty-ton bomb was used "because they had an idea where it was, they weren't sure if there was anything in it."

That uncertainty is the foundation of his objection to the claim that the Iranian nuclear programme had been obliterated.

See also

- 2026 Iran war
- The Obliteration Claim
- Hassan Nasrallah
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
