Iran has unveiled its Oghab-44 underground air base, a facility known as “Eagle 44” intended to shelter Iran’s limited combat aircraft fleet for maritime precision strikes in the Persian Gulf.
This month, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri and Iran’s Army Commander Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi presided over Oghab-44’s unveiling ceremony, which publicly showcased the underground base’s facilities and aircraft.
Iranian state media Tasnim News Agency showed photos of US-made Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantoms parked in the facility and taxiing. The report said that Oghab-44 hosts navigation equipment, fuel tanks and various facilities including alert areas, command posts, warplane hangars and repair and maintenance centers.
Although the state media report did not disclose the Oghab-44’s exact location, Defense Blog cites open-source intelligence that places the base 120 kilometers northeast of Bandar Abbas and about 30 kilometers west of Tarom, Hormozgan.
Tasnim News Agency mentions that Oghab-44 is one of many such facilities constructed across strategic locations in Iran that take advantage of remote mountainous terrain to increase survivability and serve as staging areas for surprise air attacks.
In that connection, in July 2022, Iranian state media outlet IRIB News Agency unveiled Iran’s 313 Strategic Army Drone Base, which appears to be an underground facility stocked with various surveillance and attack drones.
While the report did not mention the base’s exact location, it said it was hundreds of meters underground and contributes to Iran’s status as a regional drone power.
Iran’s unveiling of its Oghab-44 underground airbase may hint at its efforts to enable its limited number of pre-1979 Revolution aircraft to complement its missile arsenal, with its aircraft acting as precision strike platforms and its missiles acting as a mass firepower deterrent.
Along those lines, Paul Iddon notes in an article this month for Forbes that Iran has taken the lessons of the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War to better protect its aircraft from pre-emptive attacks in a conflict situation.
Iddon notes that Israel’s wholesale destruction of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground during the Six-Day War influenced Iran to harden its airbases to avoid a similar assault later in the Iran-Iraq War.
Iran’s decision to harden its airbases proved decisive in the 1980-1989 Iran-Iraq War, Iddon mentions, wherein the Iraqi Air Force attempted to destroy the Iranian Air Force on the ground but failed due to Iran’s dispersed airbases, multiple targets and hardened aircraft storage facilities.
Given that, Iddon says that Iran may be reserving its limited numbers of pre-1979 Revolution F-4 Phantom aircraft to attack moving naval and critical ground targets rather than for air defense. The decision may be due to the limited accuracy of Iran’s missile arsenal, which ensures a strike role for Iran’s obsolete combat aircraft.
Sanctions since 1979 have impacted Iran’s ability to maintain its relatively large fleet of pre-Revolution aircraft, with the 1960s F-4 Phantom still serving as the backbone of the Iranian Air Force.
Consequently, Iran must cannibalize its existing units to maintain fleet numbers, with detrimental consequences for the quality of its air arm against its regional adversaries, aircraft-based power projection and long-range strike capabilities. Moreover, this situation forces Iran to rely on its missile arsenal for strike missions that would typically be assigned to aircraft.
Anthony Cordesman notes in a May 2019 article for the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that while Iran’s investment in ballistic missiles gives it the ability to strike deep into enemy territory despite its airpower inferiority and lack of precision strike capabilities, accuracy is still the determining factor of Iran’s missile capability effectiveness.
Cordesman notes that accuracy remains the primary limitation of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, with its missiles only capable of limited point-target lethality in attacks against large targets such as cities and population centers.
Despite that, The Economist notes in a January 2020 article that Iran’s missile strike that month against Iraq’s Ain Al-Asad Airbase saw six out of 11 ballistic missiles fired scoring direct hits on protected aircraft hangars, indicating mixed accuracy against fixed targets and possibly lower accuracy on moving targets such as ships.
Iran may thus still rely on its obsolescent pre-Revolution aircraft fleet for maritime strike missions in the Persian Gulf.
In line with that, Farzin Nadimi notes this month in an article for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy that an Iranian F-4 Phantom taking off from Oghab-44 can carry two anti-ship or cruise missiles up to 1,000 kilometers before firing them.
Those weapons include the Nasr anti-ship missile with a 70-kilometer range, other anti-ship missiles with a 300-kilometer range, and Asef and Heydar cruise missiles with 1,000-kilometer and 200-kilometer ranges, respectively.
Nadimi mentions that these capabilities, coupled with Oghab-44’s strategic location, may give Iran a surprise first-strike ability and the capacity to mount precision retaliatory strikes against US ships and bases in the region.
He says Oghab-44 was built specifically to serve as a launching area for attacks against US carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf, complementing smaller air detachments of F-4 and Su-24 aircraft from Bandar Abbas and Shiraz.
Such a basing strategy, Nadimi says, is in line with Iran’s asymmetric anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) calculus that aims to cut off air and maritime access to the Persian Gulf, which in turn aims to cut off critical energy shipments and bring international pressure to stop hostilities, ideally with terms more favorable to Iran.