Iranian Missile Accuracy's Crucial Chinese Component (Allegedly)

A Chinese alternative to GPS may be crucial to draining the U.S. interceptor magazine. PLUS: FOREVER WARS x The Intercept

Edited by Sam Thielman

THE PENTAGON has released the names of two of the three U.S. servicemembers killed as the result of Iranian drone and missile fire over the weekend at bases used in Iraq and Jordan:  

1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii was killed in action on July 18, 2026, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, was killed in action on July 17, 2026, during an enemy attack on July 17, 2026, at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan. The incident is under investigation.

Lt. Feehan and Pvt. Gonzales, along with the still-unidentified third soldier killed at Erbil International Airport on Saturday, bring the casualty total on the U.S. side up to 17. Additionally, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) discovered human remains near Muwaffaq Salti, which they're analyzing to see if they match a currently-missing servicemember. 

Over the last several days, satellite imagery has appeared to show damage to a Patriot missile battery at Erbil, apparently from an Iranian drone. Similarly, Muwaffaq Salti is supposed to have air defenses—in contrast with the relatively spartan Tower 22 base in Jordan where Iran-aligned Iraqi militias killed three servicemembers in 2024. Back then, the lack of a missile battery at Tower 22 left the base reliant "on electronic warfare systems designed to disable [drones] or disrupt their path to a target," the Washington Post reported at the time.

That's going to be a problem for this renewed U.S./Israeli war on Iran.

Missile defense is hard under any circumstance. (The logic holds for defending against incoming drones as well, although there's a lot of variation in drone airframe and payload that makes these two threats different.) If I send a swarm of missiles at you, and you have a robust missile-defense system that defeats 90 percent of them—either by blowing up my missiles with your interceptors; or by spoofing or jamming their targeting signals to bring them off-target—then I feel good and you feel like you've won a Pyrrhic victory. Depending on how valuable the stuff I hit was or wasn't, I'll feel more or less good, but the successful ten percent of my barrage blew up stuff on your base that will cost you to fix or replace. And that's to set aside any human cost I inflicted. Pentagon planners will celebrate a 90 percent success rate that local commanders looking at smoking craters and dead bodies will not.

The damaged Patriot battery at Erbil represents a return to an Iranian counterforce tactic from the very start of the war. ("Counterforce" is when you target an enemy's weapons systems or hardware—it's a term often used in nuclear strategy to mean blowing up the other side's nuclear-armed missiles, bombers or submarines.) Back then, the Iranians used drones to blow up the radomes at U.S. military bases, the radar domes that guide missile-defense targeting, reducing the accuracy of expensive U.S. interceptors.

But there's a second way to perform missile defense that I mentioned above: spoofing or jamming the signals of the incoming missile and drone. If you're a commander at one of the bases that Iran sends Shahed-136s or Zolfaghar missiles at, you'd rather do it that way. Attacking or tricking the missile's guidance systems via electronic measures "typically costs a fraction of a hard kill"—an expensive interceptor blowing up a cheap missile or drone—"and, depending on the type of weapon heading your way, can often have a higher probability of kill (pKill)," wrote a former Royal Navy air/missile-defense officer, Tom Sharpe, in the Daily Telegraph last week.

Yet the success rates of Iranian missiles and drones, improved from 2025's Twelve Day War, indicates that they have countermeasures to U.S. spoofing and jamming. Longtime FOREVER WARS readers will remember from our March 12 edition that French intelligence indicated the Iranians are using an encrypted Chinese satellite-navigation alternative to U.S.-made GPS, known as BeiDou. Over the last four months, I haven't seen much in the way of hard confirmation of Iranian use of BeiDou, but analysts like Sharpe are taking it for granted. Sharpe explains:

Serious military forces can defeat sat-nav spoofing, however, because they typically have access not only to the standard navigation signals from their chosen satellites but also to encrypted signals broadcast alongside them. If an attacker has been supplied with the current encryption keys for a given sat-nav system, and the defender does not have those keys, the attacker cannot be fooled by spoofing and one of the defender’s best soft-kill methods has been rendered useless.

It appears that this is what has happened: China has given Iran access to encrypted Beidou signals, weakening the soft-kill defences of the US and its allies, reducing their probability of kill (pKill) and driving up the cost of expensive hard-kill interceptors.

You can bet that the NSA is working round the clock to obtain those BeiDou encryption keys. As Sharpe writes, without them, the U.S. is forced into the unforgiving math problem of firing off interceptors that cost a lot more than Shaheds or Zolfaghars to produce, and which in the short term must be pulled into the Middle East from other theaters (East Asia) where the U.S. seeks to deter missile strikes. Commanders do not get those interceptors back. CENTCOM, which has sustained historic damage to its arc of bases spanning the Persian Gulf, has to ration its defenses as it pursues daily attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure. (The Iranians are doing the same thing, targeting a Kuwaiti desalination plant over the weekend; this war, fitted by both sides to represent a post-Rules Based International Order conflict, is pitiless.) "We do not have enough [base defenses] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” a U.S. official told the Washington Post yesterday.

I hesitate to write about BeiDou because it's speculative. I've tried to caveat this piece accordingly. But should hard evidence emerge confirming the Iranian usage of the Chinese sat-nav system, it'll represent one of the most important military capabilities Iran has obtained for a conflict with the United States, one that helps them retain the upper hand in escalation dominance. (See the Friday's edition of Policy Tensor on that subject.) How will the U.S. respond?

LOOKING FOR A PODCAST? You can find me on Friday's episode of The Intercept Briefing, where reporter Jessica Washington kindly had me on to discuss the death of Lindsey Graham, the Iran War, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative and other stuff we've been covering recently at FOREVER WARS. Find it wherever you get your podcasts; the link above takes you to the transcript. 

THE FBI SENDS ICE an unsurprising signal of total impunity. Much as with the 2002 Justice Department memos pre-immunizing CIA torturers, this represents a green light for this lawless agency to kill more people. We've seen this time and time again during the War on Terror  and this is no time to sugarcoat it. 

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