Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has announced that its newest batch of guided ballistic missiles can alter their trajectory while airborne and switch to secondary targets on the fly. Speaking at a public gathering in Qazvin, IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi highlighted that the country’s missile inventory is moving past basic point-to-point parabolic trajectories, leaning heavily into active mid-flight guidance to slip through multi-layered air defense systems protecting Israeli cities and Western military installations.
The new maneuverability features are specifically intended to throw off interceptor calculations, giving launch operators the tactical flexibility to redirect warheads away from heavily defended primary targets toward alternative military sites or the defense batteries themselves. The technical claims focus on the use of maneuverable reentry vehicles (MaRVs) equipped with aerodynamic control surfaces and advanced thrust-vectoring nozzles.
By pulling erratic evasive maneuvers during the terminal descent phase, the warheads aim to disrupt the radar tracking and trajectory-prediction algorithms used by premier surface-to-air platforms, including Israel's Arrow-3 and David’s Sling, alongside US-operated Patriot and THAAD missile batteries stationed across the Middle East.
While terminal adjustments help a warhead dodge incoming interceptors, true mid-course retargeting requires complex encrypted communications and on-the-fly navigation processing to update flight coordinates under severe electronic warfare conditions.
Regional defense analysts view Tehran's public posturing as a strategic bid to reinforce its deterrence posture following months of tit-for-tat strikes and maritime standoffs in the Persian Gulf. Both Israeli and American defense forces have been stepping up collaborative tracking and interception drills to validate early-warning radars against evasive, high-speed threats.
Though Western military officials note that allied integrated air defense networks maintain strong tracking capabilities, the prospect of fast-moving, maneuverable warheads adds considerable operational strain for radar crews, making rapid interceptor allocation and defensive prioritizing far more difficult during saturated missile barrages.