Iran Scrambling To Restore Bombed Missile Bunkers Within Hours After Being Struck
Iran's resilience after more than a month of very heavy US-Israeli bombing has become obvious. The country's somewhat ancient air force and navy have been largely obliterated, and yet all the while the Iranian military has kept up intense ballistic missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states. Tehran's missile arsenal is what is understood to have always been formidable.
And now US intelligence has freshly assessed that Iranian personnel are busy excavating bombed underground missile bunkers and silos and restoring them to operation within a mere hours of US and Israeli strikes.
The New York Times on Friday featured American intelligence analysis saying that Tehran has retained a substantial number of missiles and mobile launchers, raising serious doubts on how close Washington actually is to eliminating the Islamic Republic’s missile capability.
The report states that Washington cannot determine how many launchers have been destroyed because Iran has deployed decoys. Underground bunkers and silos may appear damaged, but launchers are rapidly recovered from rubble and returned to use through the quick work of excavators and heavy equipment.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, has painted a rosy picture from the Pentagon's point of view: "Here are the facts: Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks are down 90 percent, their navy is wiped out, two-thirds of their production facilities are damaged or destroyed, and the United States and Israel have overwhelming air dominance over Iran," she said.
A senior Western official in the NY Times stated that Iran is firing approximately 15-30 ballistic missiles and 50-100 suicide drones per day across the region.
US officials additionally told the Times that Iran aims to preserve as much of its missile-launch capability as possible to sustain its threat posture throughout the conflict and after it ends.
Some of the remaining launchers are currently inaccessible, buried under rubble from repeated airstrikes, but there's the expectation that Iran will race to dig them out. NYT further cites the following:
Haaretz, the Israeli publication, reported earlier that Iran had used bulldozers to dig out missile launchers that had been buried, or “corked,” in underground bunkers.
President Trump and US planners around him probably didn't expect the Islamic Republic to put up as much of a fight as it's still able to do this many weeks into Operation Epic Fury.
Tehran was heavily bombed last night. Ishfahan was the main target. Visible secondary explosions suggests that underground weapon storages and missile silos were penetrated by the bunker busters.
— Global Conflict Monitor (@watchdog_global) March 31, 2026
Huge loss for Iran.#IranWar #middleastconflict #MiddleEastConflict pic.twitter.com/T7HEzhPJyh
Iranian missiles have continued to wreak havoc across Israel especially, with citizens spending many hours each day huddled in shelters, especially in central Israel and Tel Aviv.
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