Emad

The pillar of Iran's missile war — the Emad ("pillar") is Tehran's first precision-guided ballistic missile: a liquid-fuel Ghadr airframe topped with a finned, maneuvering reentry vehicle, reaching about 1,700 kilometers with a 750-kilogram warhead. It has flown in every major Iranian salvo against Israel — True Promise I and II in 2024, the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, and the 87 waves of the 2026 war — a campaign that consumed much of the arsenal and, by allied count, destroyed most of the industrial base that builds it. Its accuracy, claimed as pinpoint, measures in hundreds of meters.

Overview

The Emad is the workhorse tier of Iran's Israel-capable missile force — and, as CSIS puts it, "not an entirely new missile" at all, but a maneuverable reentry vehicle fitted atop the Shahab-3/Ghadr rocket that has anchored Iranian strategic strike since 2003. The Ghadr (covered here as family context) stretched the Nodong-derived Shahab-3 into a ~1,600–1,950 km, 750–800 kg-payload missile with a "baby-bottle" reentry vehicle and roughly 300 m accuracy; the Emad, first tested in October 2015, added a finned RV that steers aerodynamically during reentry — Iran's first step from area terror weapon toward precision strike, with independent estimates near 500 m CEP against Iranian claims of near-total accuracy. Liquid fuel is its defining operational burden: fueling before launch creates the exposure windows in which Israeli and American aircraft destroyed launchers by the hundreds in 2025–26. The Emad/Ghadr pool sat at the core of estimates of 1,000–2,500 Israel-capable missiles before the wars; by their end, Israeli officials counted ~70 percent of launch capacity neutralized and roughly a thousand missiles left — while a leaked US assessment said Iran retained ~70 percent of its stockpile, a contradiction no open source has reconciled. Named, per Iranian media, for Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh, stored in tunnel "missile cities," paraded with claimed EW countermeasures, and expended in combat at historic scale, the Emad is where Iranian missile ambition and observed performance can actually be compared — and the gap is the story.

🔒 The full Emad file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Below the line: development history, design and capabilities, variants, the combat record, advantages and limitations, comparable systems, outlook, the full specifications table, our sourcing, and the analyst assessment — procurement, suppliers and the BattlePolicy verdict. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →