US/Israel conduct airstrikes on Iran again

Be good to link to the study

That depends. It’s an atrocity either way, but war crimes do require intent. If the US struck the Minab school knowing that it was, in fact, a school, then yes, it is a war crime. However, if the building was struck based on out-of-date intelligence (wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, Chinese embassy in Belgrade, anyone?), or some issue in the missile’s terminal guidance system caused it to lock onto the wrong building in the Minab complex, that’s a different story. In either case, it's a horrific atrocity and people should be held accountable.

It’s important to understand how weapons systems like the RGM-109 Tomahawk or the AGM-86 ALCM are targeted. These weapons do not have an ongoing link to their launch platform, there’s no operator “flying” these things to their target. Prior to launch, these weapons are programmed with a map of the terrain features along their route, as well as a detailed map of the layout of the target. After launch, they use a combination of inertial navigation, GPS, and terrain following radar to fly along their route, before switching to an infrared/radar/electro-optical sensor for the final approach, what I called “terminal guidance” above. An error in any of these stages can cause the missile to diverge from its intended target and strike a building it was not meant to strike.

Then, there’s the issue of intelligence, which is where I personally believe the error occurred. The girls’ school in Minab sits right next to a complex used as an HQ for the Asaf Brigade of the naval branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The HQ is a legitimate target under the rules of war. Crucially, the building housing the school was part of the HQ until at least 2013. I've checked this myself on Google Earth, as you can see from the images below.

This is how the area looked in Google Earth in January 2013. The area marked in yellow is the school that was struck. As you can see, it is clearly a part of the HQ complex, there are no barriers of any type separating it from the rest of the HQ.

This image dates to 2016. Apart from the fact that the entire HQ complex seems to be in far better nick, we can see that the school is now separated from the HQ by a wall, indicating that at some point between 2013 and 2016, that part of the complex was "spun off". However, it's not quite that straightforward.

This is a screenshot of how the complex looked in OSM until a few days ago. It has since been edited to reflect the actual situation but you can see that the entire complex, including the school, are marked as a military area. So the intelligence picture is muddled.

There's also the fact that Minab doesn't strike me as a particularly important location. Granted, it's a base of the IRGC, and a HQ at that, but it's not the type of place where you're going to have non-stop surveillance or intelligence agents on the ground. Especially not when you have a much bigger target, Bandar Abbas with its air and naval bases, just fifty kilometres away. My personal suspicion is that during the planning for the strike, the planning staff simply pulled a list of known IRGC locations, checked whether there was anything particularly unusual visible in recent satellite images, anything unusual about it online, and when that came back clean, marked it as a valid target and sent that on to the respective US Navy planning department to develop the terrain maps for the Tomahawks, which would then be sent on down the chain of command to whichever ship or submarine was assigned that particular target for them to upload into the missile. Mind you, this all happened weeks, if not months before the missiles were launched.

Having written all that, I don't think we can completely rule out a terminal guidance issue either. Take a look at the image below, which I got from U.M., a German language OSINT blog run by a guy called Joey Hoffmann, a military intelligence analyst and Bundeswehr veteran with decades of experience. I honestly don't like using this, but there doesn't seem to be a way for me to get a hand on the original image that Planet Labs published a few days back.

Anyway, this shows the aftermath of the strike on Minab. We can see that several buildings in the HQ complex have been struck. You'll see that the impacts on many of the buildings are right in the middle of the structure. That's because the cruise missiles used for the attack flew a "pop up" manoeuvre, gaining altitude before diving down to strike the target from above and penetrate deep inside before detonating. This isn't unique to the Tomahawk, most cruise missiles do this. Ukraine's Flamingo cruise missile demonstrated their capability to do that in a strike against a Russian missile plant a week or two ago.

However, if you look at the school building, the damage looks completely different. Over half of the building is gone. To me, this looks like the missile struck the building at a much shallower angle. This could have been a deliberate choice by the missile's onboard computer, or it could indicate that something happened during final approach to the target that made it impossible to do the pop up manoeuvre.

Once again, that does not absolve the attacker of responsibility for their actions, and it does not change the fact that this was a horrible atrocity. It also does not change the fact that this is a blatant war of aggression, a flagrant violation of international law, and a clusterf*ck for the ages! Let me be very clear, because I know this comes up in this thread a lot, I am horrified by the actions of both the US and Israel, even if I do consider Iran a very real danger to the region.