Iran attempted to strike Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island base critically enabling U.S. strikes, with a pair of ballistic missiles.
Tehran launched what is believed to be an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) for the first time in an apparent bid to take out the runway at Diego Garcia. The joint British-American base in the Indian Ocean is a critical fulcrum for Western power projection in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, supporting the largest and heaviest bomber missions as well as warships.
Broadcaster CNN claims to have been told by a U.S. defence source that the attempted attack took place on Friday, but that both missiles failed to find their targets and there was no damage or injuries. Britain’s Daily Telegraph states that one of the missiles spontaneously failed mid-flight, and the second was brought down by an interceptor missile fired by a warship.
Unlike cruise missiles, which reach their targets by flying on a relatively flat trajectory through the atmosphere and often hugging the ground to confound anti-missile defences, ballistic missiles fly up into the outer atmosphere or near space before plunging back to Earth. This flight path makes them harder to intercept and, if destroyed while returning to earth, can still spread wreckage travelling at extremely high speed onto and around the intended target.
These missiles are classified by their potential range, with IRBMs being the second-longest range after the worldwide-strike Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the ICBM. Until this point, it was not known that Iran had IRBM capabilities, raising the possibility that the nation’s space programme was hiding another weapons system, or that other missiles may have had their true capabilities underplayed.
Iranian state media claimed the strike — though making no mention of it having apparently failed — boasting of the long range of their weapons and ability to threaten American targets outside of the region.
The attempted attack on the strategic Indian Ocean base came on the same day Iran issued warnings to the United Kingdom, telling it to stop “participating” in U.S. “aggression” and to stop supporting “Zionist… terrorist networks”.
The Diego Garcia base has repeatedly grabbed headlines over the past year after the British government, which owns the island on which the base is located, attempted to give the land to Mauritius, an East African country that critics say is becoming dangerously close to China’s sphere of influence.
While British diplomats dispatched by London apparently worked with exceptional tenacity to persuade the U.S. administration that giving away the land under one of America’s most important airbases was essential to appease international law and a geostrategic win, the actual implications of the deal later became apparent. U.S. President Donald Trump emerged as a key critic of the proposed deal, calling it a “blight” on Britain.
