Iran Military Forum

With all the talk recently of missiles silos in Iran, I figured it was a good time to taken a closer look at what some of Iran's missile silos look like.

Now there are two sites suspected by amateur observers as possible locations of missile silos. One is rather logical, the Imam Ali missile base in SW Iran which is a rather impressive complex when you look at it. It has dozens and dozens of what appear to be small launch pads for launching SSMs. However the position of the claimed missile silos there are not very convincing to me. When you look at the supposed location on GE, they are rather hard to see and in new images they are nearly impossible to make out at all. So for the moment, I will focus on the second site.

This site is just outside of the city of Tabriz. The facility is much smaller than the base on Imam Ali but has what IMO can only be missile silos. They feature all the distinctive features of silos:
1. Sliding doors
2. Exhaust vents not far from the doors
3. A rectangular piece of concrete leading away from doors, which possibly could be part of a loading system (my opinion only)

Also I have no clue what else they could be considering there appearance and striking similarity to early US missile silos.

The odd thing about them of course, is they aren't even remotely hidden. They are placed in pairs..That's right "pairs". Originally when the site was first noticed, it had just the two missile silos but now I have studied new GE imagery and have discovered that a few years after the first two silos were completed..Two more were added to the complex!

Now when I look at the complex and see how undescreet the missile are placed, I think of it being a testing/training facility. But if that is true..why add two more silos?

Notice the images below which show the progress of construction at the site.

Here are some images of the now four silos, with the year for each image imbedded in the file name:

I'm sure iran has built a lot of decoys, how can we make sure that his one is not?

YMJ,

Personally I am leaning towards it being a testing facility since there isn't much infastructure around the silos. It suggests the facility has a fairly small number of personel and therefore isn't terribly active. Then again the construction of two more several years after the first ones is rather puzzling if it was just a testing facility.

It's complete lacking of attempted hiding of the facility to me suggests it isn't a decoy or else they would likely make at least some attempt to hide them so they would look like operational sites.

However regardless, they would be targeted in any large scale US strike since it would foolish not to.