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.

Development

The lineage runs from the North Korean Nodong through the Shahab-3 (operational 2003, ~2,500 m CEP) to the Ghadr — unveiled 2007: stretched aluminum airframe, ~19-tonne launch weight, 1,600–1,950 km range and ~300 m accuracy, per CSIS Missile Threat. The Emad's first test on 11 October 2015, presented by then-Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan with claims it could "strike targets with a high level of precision," drew US condemnation as a violation of UNSCR 1929 given the design's inherent nuclear capability. CSIS's analysis frames it precisely: a new finned, guided MaRV on the proven Ghadr booster — aerodynamic terminal steering, not the powered post-boost maneuvering of the later Fattah-1. A claimed anti-ship variant (2021's Great Prophet 15 exercise, a target ">1,800 km" away) is recorded by CSIS with explicit skepticism. Combat rewrote the file from 2024: Emad and Ghadr flew in True Promise I (April 2024 — an intercepted Emad's fuel tank was fished from the Dead Sea area after a ~1,500 km, ~12-minute flight) and True Promise II (October 2024), per ISW; in the June 2025 Twelve-Day War's ~574-missile campaign — where the IDF filmed the destruction of an Emad launcher primed to fire, and Iran claimed the first combat use of a "multi-warhead" Ghadr-H; and throughout the 2026 war, where Emads were typed in Wave 81's impacts near the Negev Nuclear Research Center and Ghadr-F submunition warheads turned 42 missiles into 230 impact points, per Politics Today's open-source tally. October 2025 state TV showed "upgraded" Emads with claimed electronic-warfare countermeasures in tunnel complexes — claims, like most of this file's Iranian layer.

🔒 The rest of the Emad file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Stop here and you miss the part that actually matters: accuracy claims versus the observed hit counts, the inventory-attrition math of the 2025–26 wars, how it stacks up against Kheibar Shekan and Sejjil, the complete specifications table, and our analysts' assessment notes. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →