Why did Iran's air defense fail against a Tomahawk cruise missile designed in the 1970s? Iran layered Russian S-300s, the homegrown Bavar-373 and heavy GPS jamming across its sky, yet the US Navy's Tomahawk still opened that sky for the strikes that followed.

This is the engineering behind it. Flying below the radar horizon, the Tomahawk stays off Iranian screens until the last few miles. Terrain contour matching (TERCOM) and a scene-matching camera (DSMAC) let it navigate even when GPS is jammed. Fired from Arleigh Burke destroyers, Ticonderoga cruisers and Ohio-class guided-missile submarines like USS Georgia, hundreds arrive together from every direction. We take the Tomahawk apart layer by layer, from the Block IV and Block V upgrades that keep a 1970s design current, to the hard line between opening a sky and cracking a buried bunker like Fordow.

#USNavy #NavyDecoded #StraitOfHormuz #Tomahawk #Iran #CruiseMissile #MissileDefense

Timestamps:
0:00 The missile no radar saw coming
2:27 What breaking an air defense really takes
5:03 Why a modest warhead is more than enough
9:10 How it finds its way with the sky jammed
12:59 Where the missiles actually come from
16:32 The geometry money cannot buy past
18:29 Why fifty years never made it obsolete