Underground: Shelter or a Way Out?

In recent years, “underground” and “tunnel” have become recurring terms in the Islamic Republic’s military vocabulary: missile cities, drone bases, depots and underground facilities. Now Reza Talaei-Nik, spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, has also said that some of the armed forces’ strategic capabilities are located in “secure environments and underground infrastructure”. He claims this has prevented some of the other side’s calculations about the Islamic Republic’s defensive capabilities and weapons-production capacity from coming to fruition.

But outside the government’s official rhetoric, “underground” has acquired another meaning too.

On parts of social media, officials going to shelters are no longer described merely as taking protective measures; the idea has found its way into jokes and ridicule. “Rat”, “rat hole” and the image of someone scurrying underground to save themselves have become part of people’s reactions.

We can laugh at these jokes or dismiss them as merely part of psychological warfare. But behind this image lies a serious question:

When a government moves a significant part of its military capability underground, exactly what is it preserving?

The missiles? The commander? The ability to fight? Or the government itself?

To answer, perhaps it would be better to step away from Iran for a moment and look at experiences in which moving forces, production or command underground formed part of a strategy for war and survival.

Germany: The factory remained; the government did not

After the bombing of the Peenemünde rocket research centre in August 1943, the Nazi government moved a substantial part of V-2 production to the underground Mittelwerk complex in the Harz Mountains. Thousands of prisoners from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp were forced to build and operate the complex in deadly conditions.

Technically, the move underground worked. The production lines remained active almost until the final days before the site was evacuated, and from September 1944 around 600 to 700 V-2 rockets were produced each month.

So the underground facility had done its job. The factory was still working. But what was happening beyond the tunnels?

The German army was losing ground on the fronts, the country’s transport and industry were under pressure, and Allied forces were advancing from east and west. The underground factory remained, but the government for which it built weapons surrendered.

So the first question is:

If the weapon and the factory survive, but their owner can no longer continue the war, what has the underground saved?

Japan: A costlier defeat, but defeat all the same

On Iwo Jima, the Japanese faced a different problem. American air superiority had left Japanese forces almost entirely without air cover, while surface positions had become vulnerable to bombardment and heavy fire.

Their answer was simple: go deeper.

Natural caves were turned into bunkers, depots, artillery positions and a network of connected tunnels. The Japanese commander, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, designed a war of attrition rather than trying to stop the Americans on the beach: let the invader enter the island, but make them pay for every metre of ground. Official US Navy sources say that the network of tunnels and deep fortifications turned a battle expected to be short into one that lasted more than six weeks.

The tunnels preserved some of the forces and equipment and raised the cost of an attack. But Iwo Jima fell.

Here, a second question takes shape:

Is being defeated later the same as not being defeated?

Vietnam: when the outcome was different

Vietnam makes the comparison more difficult, because this time the forces that used the underground network ultimately ended up on the winning side of the war.

The Cu Chi tunnels were not merely places to hide. The network included ammunition depots, hospitals, dining areas, production facilities and support services, and some sections extended for dozens of kilometres.

But does Vietnam prove that going underground is a path to victory?

No.

The tunnels were only one component of a much larger structure: a political organisation, military forces, a logistics network, foreign support and a strategy that continued for years. Moreover, the underground’s function in Vietnam was not the same as in Iran. There, tunnels were mainly a tool for ground and guerrilla warfare, whereas the Islamic Republic speaks of protecting missiles, equipment, command structures and weapons-production capacity.

From Gaza to southern Lebanon: when the tunnel itself becomes the target

More recent examples show another side of the issue.

In Gaza, Hamas’s tunnel network has been one of the group’s military-operation pillars. Israel has used various methods to locate and disable the network, from ground operations and explosions to pumping large quantities of water into some underground routes. In January 2024, the Israeli military officially confirmed using water pumps to disable some tunnels; nevertheless, public evidence does not allow us to say that the entire tunnel network has been destroyed.

In southern Lebanon, the story is similar. In September 2026, the Israeli military announced that it had destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network in the Ali al-Taher heights: a complex more than two kilometres long which, according to the same military’s account, included command centres, weapons depots, missiles, drones and accommodation for forces. Since this information was released by the Israeli military, it should be treated as a claim made by that source.

These experiences make one more point clear:

The underground is not just a shelter; once discovered, it can itself become the main target of the war.

The more important an underground network is, the more resources the other side will devote to finding, encircling, infiltrating or destroying it. Going deeper does not eliminate the threat; it only changes the form of the battle.

What does the underground preserve?

The military importance of underground facilities cannot be denied. If the other side has air superiority, moving equipment and command structures deep underground can make them harder to detect and destroy, buy time and increase the cost of an attack.

But historical experience also points to an important distinction:

Preserving weapons, preserving the capacity to fight, and preserving a government are not the same thing.

Of course, comparing Iran today with Germany and Japan in 1945 should not be done mechanically. Germany and Japan faced armies, but the question regarding Iran is different: could air and missile strikes, without a large-scale ground invasion, so erode the country’s ability to govern and continue the war that the survival of part of its arsenal would no longer be decisive?

If the missile survives underground, what is left above ground?

What condition is the economy in? What about energy? How long can communications, command, transport, production, logistics and the capacity to run the country’s day-to-day affairs endure?

Interestingly, Sardar Pasdar Talaeinik, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defence, has also stressed, after speaking about underground infrastructure, that maintaining defence capabilities requires resilience in other areas. In other words, even in the Ministry of Defence’s official account, the underground alone is not the answer to everything.

Perhaps the image of the ‘mouse’ ‘crawling underground’ on social media is, for many, simply a political jibe. But history shows that the issue is more complicated than a joke.

Germany showed that factories can survive underground while a government is defeated.

Japan showed that tunnels can make defeat longer and more costly.

Vietnam showed that the underground matters more when it is part of a broader political, military and logistical strategy.

Gaza and southern Lebanon also show that any underground network, if detected, can turn from ‘shelter’ into ‘target’.

So perhaps the final question is not how many kilometres of tunnels the Islamic Republic has or how many missiles it has hidden in them.

The question is:

When a significant part of a state’s power moves underground, does what remains above ground still have the strength to sustain the government and continue the war?

History offers no definitive answer for Iran today; but it makes one distinction clear:

Sheltering the instruments of power is not the same as preserving power itself.

S. Rouzbeh