On November 4th, Iran’s Channel 1 aired the unveiling of “missile machine gun”, a system capable of rapidly and accurately firing long-range ballistic missiles. “This means that if the enemies of this country decide to make a mistake, they would have no opportunity to move or breathe,” Channel 1 reporter said.
“This newest innovation from the IRGC’s Aerospace Force is a smart system capable of rapid or timed fire of ballistic missiles,” Channel 1 reporter noted. “More than anything, this is evidence of the liveliness and the dynamic nature of the Islamic Revolution.”
According to Channel 1 news, all of Iran’s underground missile cities will be equipped with this technology.
IRGC Commander-in-Chief General Hossein Salami, who made an address at the unveiling, said that Iran must prove its technical, tactical, operational, and strategic “control” over the enemy.
This is just one of Iran’s dozens of missile cities that contain the launch silos, the warehouses, the carriages, and the containers that store the missiles upright and ready to be launched. This showcases their new and destructive capacity to those who want to meddle with Iran.
“Today, this capability guarantees that our regime will continue to live and to deter its enemies,” Salami said.
The IRGC unveiling of the missile machine gun coincided with the US presidential election, where the two candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump despite disagreeing on many issues, have both shared concerns about Iran’s missile program.
The same concerns have also been expressed by the United Nations and European leaders, who have previously stressed on Iran to come to the negotiating table regarding its missiles.
However, this is a demand the Iranian government has continuously rejected, defending its missile program as a legitimate right guaranteed by its doctrine of deterrence.
History has proven Iran’s readiness to activate its missile program. In the most recent years, Iran has fired those missiles against multiple different targets.
The most notable one in January, when over a dozen of them landed on the US-run Ain al-Asad airbase in neighboring Iraq. The attack was Iran’s response to the killing of its top general Qasem Soleimani in a US airstrike.
Yet, not all Iranian missiles have always hit military targets.
Around the same time in which IRGC forces were conducting the retaliatory mission and were fearing a US response, they hit a passenger plane right outside the capital, Tehran, in what they called “mistaken” fire, killing 176 people onboard the Kyiv-bound plane operated by Ukraine International Airlines.
