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Iranian missiles are defeating US soft-kill defences using Chinese guidance
Tehran’s widest single-night barrage targeted facilities in five countries after Beijing reportedly shared encrypted sat-nav keys
Tom SharpeShow biography
Published 15 July 2026 12:27pm BST
Iran used mixed salvos of Zolfaghar ballistic missiles and drones to target US facilities in the Gulf Credit: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/ Getty
Early this Sunday, Iran launched its widest single-night attack of the war so far: mixed salvos of Zolfaghar ballistic missiles and drones simultaneously targeting US facilities in five countries – Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Prince Hassan air base in Jordan and Duqm harbour in Oman.
As ever, damage reports vary, but it does seem that casualties were light. The significance, however, lies in one of the reasons the missiles got through. Many had reportedly been upgraded to make use of China’s encrypted BeiDou-3 satellite-navigation system. This made them significantly harder to stop and much more expensive to do so.
This is because there are basically two ways to stop a missile which is coming at you, or at something you are trying to protect. “Hard kill” involves hitting the incoming threat with a projectile of some sort, usually an interceptor missile of your own, sometimes a cannon shell or a bullet. That’s spectacular, filmable and – in the case of interceptor missiles – typically very expensive.
“Soft kill” defeats the enemy missile without touching it: jamming or spoofing its seeker head or navigation, or seducing it away from the target with active or passive decoys, flares or chaff. This typically costs a fraction of a hard kill and, depending on the type of weapon heading your way, can often have a higher probability of kill (pKill). When I was last doing this for real, soft-kill techniques often had a better success rate than shooting missiles down.
Those stats have been reversed because interceptor missiles are much more capable than they were back then. Conversely, missile seeker heads and navigation methods are better at seeing through attempts to distract them. Nevertheless, for the highest pKill against a range of missiles and drones fired at you, you want a mixture of both hard and soft and then the principal warfare officer (in the case of a warship on the defence) determines which method to use against which weapon and at what range.
Modern fire control systems do much of the maths for you – essential in the era of ever-faster weapons – but the principle of wanting a range of methods to defeat an airborne threat at your disposal remains. Soft kill rarely gets any headlines because success is invisible: a missile splashing harmlessly into the sea 10 miles from anything makes poor television, and the detail is often classified.
One of the most powerful methods of soft kill is spoofing. This is when false satellite navigation signals are transmitted towards a missile, overpowering the relatively weak signals from distant satellites and tricking the missile into believing it is somewhere other than its actual location.
Any Iranian missile making use of any basic sat-nav signal – America’s GPS, Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s Glonass, China’s Beidou – could be fooled and thus soft-killed by spoofing.
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.
Iran is determined to keep up the pressure on Donald Trump - pictured in a coffin on a huge billboard in Enghelab Square in Tehran Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock
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.
Burning through interceptors faster than they can be replaced is not a new problem. I wrote here in May that the US had already fired about half of its Patriot PAC-3 inventory at $4.2m (£3.3m) a shot, and between 53-80 per cent of its THAAD interceptors at $12.7m each – that’s up to $10bn of defensive weaponry gone across just two systems. Every time one is fired, I reckon someone in Beijing rings a bell – and rings it extra hard if the target was a cheap $20,000 drone.. The bells are ringing again now.
And the figures have since worsened. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ ceasefire audit found that, for four of seven critical munitions, the US had expended more than half of its pre-war inventory, particularly of offensive missiles.: more than 1,000 Tomahawks, about 1,100 JASSM air-launched stealth cruise missiles and, reportedly, the entire stock of the new Precision Strike Missile. Production increases are promised – Patriot output to triple, THAAD from 96 a year to 400 – but rebuilding the US arsenal will still take years.
The cat-and-mouse between methods of attack and defence continues to evolve with both sides suffering significant weapon losses along the way. The US will not allow itself to run out of interceptors but is going to have to pay a massive bill to ensure it doesn’t and some of these stocks will take years to replenish.
Beijing is clearly happy to do what it can along the way to make this problem worse.
Tehran’s widest single-night barrage targeted facilities in five countries after Beijing reportedly shared encrypted sat-nav keys
Tom SharpeShow biography
Published 15 July 2026 12:27pm BST
Iran used mixed salvos of Zolfaghar ballistic missiles and drones to target US facilities in the Gulf Credit: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/ Getty
Early this Sunday, Iran launched its widest single-night attack of the war so far: mixed salvos of Zolfaghar ballistic missiles and drones simultaneously targeting US facilities in five countries – Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Prince Hassan air base in Jordan and Duqm harbour in Oman.
As ever, damage reports vary, but it does seem that casualties were light. The significance, however, lies in one of the reasons the missiles got through. Many had reportedly been upgraded to make use of China’s encrypted BeiDou-3 satellite-navigation system. This made them significantly harder to stop and much more expensive to do so.
This is because there are basically two ways to stop a missile which is coming at you, or at something you are trying to protect. “Hard kill” involves hitting the incoming threat with a projectile of some sort, usually an interceptor missile of your own, sometimes a cannon shell or a bullet. That’s spectacular, filmable and – in the case of interceptor missiles – typically very expensive.
“Soft kill” defeats the enemy missile without touching it: jamming or spoofing its seeker head or navigation, or seducing it away from the target with active or passive decoys, flares or chaff. This typically costs a fraction of a hard kill and, depending on the type of weapon heading your way, can often have a higher probability of kill (pKill). When I was last doing this for real, soft-kill techniques often had a better success rate than shooting missiles down.
Those stats have been reversed because interceptor missiles are much more capable than they were back then. Conversely, missile seeker heads and navigation methods are better at seeing through attempts to distract them. Nevertheless, for the highest pKill against a range of missiles and drones fired at you, you want a mixture of both hard and soft and then the principal warfare officer (in the case of a warship on the defence) determines which method to use against which weapon and at what range.
Modern fire control systems do much of the maths for you – essential in the era of ever-faster weapons – but the principle of wanting a range of methods to defeat an airborne threat at your disposal remains. Soft kill rarely gets any headlines because success is invisible: a missile splashing harmlessly into the sea 10 miles from anything makes poor television, and the detail is often classified.
One of the most powerful methods of soft kill is spoofing. This is when false satellite navigation signals are transmitted towards a missile, overpowering the relatively weak signals from distant satellites and tricking the missile into believing it is somewhere other than its actual location.
Any Iranian missile making use of any basic sat-nav signal – America’s GPS, Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s Glonass, China’s Beidou – could be fooled and thus soft-killed by spoofing.
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.
Iran is determined to keep up the pressure on Donald Trump - pictured in a coffin on a huge billboard in Enghelab Square in Tehran Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock
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.
Burning through interceptors faster than they can be replaced is not a new problem. I wrote here in May that the US had already fired about half of its Patriot PAC-3 inventory at $4.2m (£3.3m) a shot, and between 53-80 per cent of its THAAD interceptors at $12.7m each – that’s up to $10bn of defensive weaponry gone across just two systems. Every time one is fired, I reckon someone in Beijing rings a bell – and rings it extra hard if the target was a cheap $20,000 drone.. The bells are ringing again now.
And the figures have since worsened. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ ceasefire audit found that, for four of seven critical munitions, the US had expended more than half of its pre-war inventory, particularly of offensive missiles.: more than 1,000 Tomahawks, about 1,100 JASSM air-launched stealth cruise missiles and, reportedly, the entire stock of the new Precision Strike Missile. Production increases are promised – Patriot output to triple, THAAD from 96 a year to 400 – but rebuilding the US arsenal will still take years.
The cat-and-mouse between methods of attack and defence continues to evolve with both sides suffering significant weapon losses along the way. The US will not allow itself to run out of interceptors but is going to have to pay a massive bill to ensure it doesn’t and some of these stocks will take years to replenish.
Beijing is clearly happy to do what it can along the way to make this problem worse.
