Methodology & Caveats

This tracker provides a current operational assessment of Iran's missile and drone capacity during the 2026 conflict. It is not a raw data dump or a news aggregator. Every number is either a confirmed floor (from official sources) or a best estimate (triangulated from multiple source tiers).

1. Never confuse stockpile with launch capacity. Stockpile = missiles/drones physically held. Launch capacity = what Iran can actually fire given launchers, crews, logistics, and C2.
2. Launcher count is the primary KPI for ballistic-missile effectiveness.
3. Official target-country tallies are the floor, not the full total.
4. Best estimate must be kept separate from confirmed floor.
5. Single-source cumulative tallies never become the baseline on their own.
6. If the model changes materially, say why. Do not silently overwrite old judgments.

Tier	Sources	Usage
1	UAE MoD, Bahrain Defence Force, IDF official reporting, ISW/CTP	Default anchors — cumulative figures used directly
2	Pentagon/CENTCOM/JCS, Saudi/Qatar/Kuwait MoD, Janes/FDD/JINSA/Alma	Useful but must be triangulated against Tier 1
3	Reuters, NYT, BBC, Guardian, CNN, AP, FT, WSJ	Event discovery and confirmation only
4	IRGC, Fars, Tasnim, Iranian state media	Claims / propaganda only — never used as anchors

Confirmed Floor

The sum of official cumulative intercept counts from each target country. UAE MoD figures are the highest-confidence anchor. Other Gulf states contribute medium-confidence working tallies built from official daily reports and cumulative snapshots.

Best Estimate

The confirmed floor plus adjustments for:

• Underreporting in the Israel theater (significant but underpublished in clean cumulative form)
• Missiles/drones that struck targets without being intercepted
• Strikes on Jordan, Iraq, Oman, and other non-primary theaters
• Reporting gaps between Gulf state daily updates

Launcher Estimates

Derived from IDF/ISW structured reporting on pre-war launcher counts, confirmed strikes on launch bases (29+ as of Apr 1), production facility destruction, and qualitative indicators like IRGC morale collapse and C2 decapitation (two senior Aerospace Force commanders killed within 48 hours).

On Day 20, the tracker was restructured from a narrative log to a structured floor/best-estimate model. Pre-Day 20 data used a different methodology (less structured, wider ranges). The two series are not directly comparable, and charts mark this transition.

• Pre-Mar 19 data uses a different methodology (less structured, wider ranges)
• Kuwait and Qatar cumulatives were significantly revised upward on Mar 23 after Wikipedia cross-reference
• Saudi data is methodologically noisy; BM/CM split only available from Mar 20
• Drone pre-war estimates range 30K-80K — extremely wide uncertainty
• Launcher estimates are judgmental, combining hardware kills with C2/morale degradation
• Production was ongoing early in the war but is assessed as halted for BMs since ~Mar 29

Every update reports:

• Confirmed floor
• Best estimate
• Confidence level
• What changed in the last 24h
• What would change the assessment next

We avoid: pseudo-precise arithmetic unsupported by data, treating destroyed launchers as destroyed missile inventory, large narrative swings from a single source family, and repeating full war history in every update.

The full source material behind this tracker is available in the source/ directory of this repository:

• source/current-state.md — Latest tracker summary
• source/ledger.md — Structured cumulative reference with every official data point
• source/daily-log.md — Dated daily analytical notes
• source/methodology.md — This methodology in plain Markdown
• source/archive/ — Pre-restructure historical tracker (2,273 lines)