Six months after Israeli strikes destroyed critical infrastructure at Iran's ballistic missile production sites, Tehran is racing to restore its manufacturing capacity—and Israeli officials warn the Islamic Republic is preparing to test a new doctrine built on overwhelming Israel's layered defenses with synchronized salvos numbering in the hundreds, potentially exceeding a thousand missiles at once. In a closed briefing to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, a senior Israel Defense Forces official confirmed that Iran has resumed large-scale ballistic missile production, with facilities operating around the clock to rebuild capabilities damaged during the June 2025 conflict. The warning comes amid fresh evidence of industrial recovery, procurement workarounds, and a December 5 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval drill that showcased missile and drone launches in the Persian Gulf, accompanied by warnings to nearby U.S. vessels.
The speed of Iran's reconstitution effort is forcing Israeli and American strategists to recalculate the timeline and character of the next escalation. Tehran's bet on mass salvos reflects both tactical necessity—countering sophisticated missile defenses—and strategic constraint. With its proxy network collapse limiting regional leverage and domestic pressures mounting, Iran's ballistic missiles have become the centerpiece of its deterrent architecture, transforming production bottlenecks into urgent national-security priorities and escalation itself into a numbers game.
Industrial recovery despite mixer bottlenecks
Satellite imagery analyzed by the Associated Press shows active reconstruction at two key missile-production complexes—Parchin and Shahroud—that were targeted during the June war. Building activity is visible at mixing facilities where planetary mixers, essential for blending solid rocket propellant, were destroyed. Those mixers remain a critical bottleneck: experts say they are difficult to replace quickly and their absence forces Iran to rely on older, slower, and potentially less reliable manufacturing methods that may compromise propellant consistency and missile performance.
Yet production is clearly resuming. CNN reporting, citing European intelligence sources, documents a procurement surge: between late September and December, Iran imported approximately 2,000 metric tons of sodium perchlorate from China across ten to twelve maritime shipments. Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation specialist, estimates that volume could support production of roughly 500 missiles—a significant start, though full reconstitution of Iran's pre-war stockpile would require considerably more. Sodium perchlorate occupies a sanctions gray zone; unlike ammonium perchlorate, it is not explicitly banned, allowing Tehran to exploit legal ambiguity. The chemical is not without risk: an explosion at Bandar Abbas port in April, linked to perchlorate shipments, killed approximately seventy people, underscoring the hazards of accelerated logistics under constrained conditions.
Israeli sources now assess that the damage inflicted on Iran's missile program was less severe than initially believed. According to reports in Israeli media, Iran currently possesses around 2,000 heavy ballistic missiles—an inventory that, while reduced from pre-war levels, still represents formidable firepower. During the June conflict, Iran launched 574 ballistic missiles at Israeli targets, according to the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and killed 28 people inside Israel, per Israeli government figures. Regional intelligence assessments cited in Israeli reporting indicate that Tehran's operational planning now envisions launching 500 to 1,000 missiles in a single engagement; some Israeli officials and analysts warn that Iran's ambitions may stretch to 2,000 simultaneous launches, though this upper figure should be understood as a worst-case Israeli warning rather than a confirmed Iranian plan.
Members are reading: How Iran's mass-salvo arithmetic creates a dangerous escalation treadmill and why production bottlenecks may push Tehran toward riskier timing and tactics.
A race between output and interdiction
The strategic dynamic now centers on competing timelines. Iran is rebuilding faster than many observers expected, exploiting procurement loopholes, improvising around destroyed equipment, and signaling renewed readiness through military exercises. Israel and the United States, meanwhile, are intensifying counter-proliferation efforts—evident in joint maritime and missile-defense drills such as "Intrinsic Defender"—and considering options to disrupt supply chains or strike reconstituted production nodes before Iran can restore full capacity.
This race is complicated by broader pressures on the Islamic Republic. As detailed in previous Crisis Zone analysis of Iran's nuclear brinkmanship and water crisis, Tehran faces dual strategic and domestic stressors that make ballistic missile capacity all the more critical to regime survival. With proxy networks weakened and resupply constrained, missiles represent the most reliable tool for deterrence and, if deterrence fails, for inflicting costs that might compel negotiation or outside intervention.
Yet the salvo-first doctrine introduces a paradox: the larger the planned strike, the greater the intelligence signature during buildup, and the stronger the incentive for adversaries to preempt. If Israel concludes that Iran is nearing the capacity to execute a 1,000-plus-missile attack, the window for preventive action narrows sharply. That dynamic, combined with the technical uncertainties inherent in improvised production and alternative propellants, raises the odds of miscalculation—whether through premature escalation, accidental launch, or an incident in the Gulf that spirals beyond either side's control.
Iran's rebuilt factories may be running hot, but the missiles rolling off those lines carry not only warheads but also the accumulated risks of a strategy that substitutes quantity for the precision and industrial depth that Israeli strikes sought to deny.
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