A group of Western military experts, who carried out a recent in-depth study of IranÂ’s high-sounding war games and scary weaponry, has concluded that they are largely a show is put on to conceal a poorly-equipped, under-trained military and elite Revolutionary Guards corps. DEBKA-Net-Weekly 293 revealed on March 16 some of the eye-openers found by those experts, when they took a close look at IranÂ’s Great Prophet Maneuvers One and Two and the Zolfaqhar Blow war game staged at the end of 2006 and early 2007. They homed in on the dozens of rockets and missiles claimed to have been test-fired.
The Shehab-3’s cluster bomb warhead was presented by Iran as containing up to 1,400 bomblets. It was announced that this ballistic missile (1,000-1,200 km range) was tested for the first time in a live exercise, together with the Zolfaqar-73, the Scud B, the Fath-110 and the Zelzal. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources say that no objective observer saw the actual Shehab-3 test – and certainly not the Shehab-4, which was also mentioned. The only proven firings were performed by the Shehab-2 and the Fath-110, both of which are outdated and short on accuracy. It is therefore impossible to establish whether or not the Iranian Shehab-3 lives up to Tehran’s claim that it carries a multiple-bomb warhead. The researchers argued that, if it were true, Iran would have exhibited the missile in action.
The experts also dissected Iranian footage of the simultaneous firing of a large number of rockets and concluded that this effect was contrived by clever editing of the video film. Furthermore, the researchers noticed that, in all their practices, Iranian commanders used the same small number of missile-launchers over and over, indicating a severe shortage of launchers. They are also apparently short of missiles.
Iranian missiles are color-coded according to type. Shehab-3Â’s colors are red and brown; Shehab 2, green. After close attention to the film released by Tehran, the analysts were quite sure that the putative Shehab-3s, whose firings were recorded, were in fact Shehab-2 missiles disguised under a coat of red and brown paint to fool viewers. |