—a technological capability that not even the United States or Russia claim to have.
Speaking Monday to the Fars news agency, the commander of the Khatam ol-Anbia Air Defense Base, Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, said, “These systems will appear on the scene and do their tasks in time of threat.
“Any incoming missile will be destroyed or redirected to hit a target which we specify before it could harm the holy land of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the commander said. ”This is an electronic warfare capability by which we are the side that defines the target for the enemy missile.”
The United States does not claim to have any electronic warfare system for deflecting missiles. For decades, the United States has concentrated on anti-missile missiles that can intercept and destroy an incoming missile by exploding near to it.
The Islamic Republic’s claim goes far beyond anything the Russians or Americans claim to have—or, for that matter, even claim to be dreaming of since the “death ray” days of the Star Wars program under President Ronald Reagan in 1980s.
Iranian military officials had earlier announced that the country had developed the technology to reprogram and redirect incoming enemy missiles, and Fars said Esmaili’s remarks pertained to the mass-production of systems equipped with this technology.
Last November a senior Iranian air defense commander announced that the country planned to equip its air defense units with a state-of-the-art electronic warfare technology to be used for deflecting an enemy’s guided missiles.
Speaking to Fars then, the lieutenant commander of the Khatam ol-Anbia Air Defense Base, Colonel Moharram Qolizadeh, pointed to the key role of electronic jamming systems in winning electronic warfare, and said Iran was seeking to go one more step to deceive and deflect incoming missiles.
“When a guided missile is launched by the enemy, it is not possible to destroy it through jamming systems, but it is only possible to redirect it in a way that the missile loses its precision targeting capability,” Qolizadeh said.
”We have a project at hand that is in fact a stage ahead of jamming to ‘deceive’ the incoming missiles,” he commander announced.
“At this stage, we disrupt transmission of data to the data processing unit of the incoming missile and reprogram it with our own information and redirect the missile toward our desired point.”