Iran's Defense Ministry said it had mass-produced the country's first long-range naval ballistic missile with a host of new combat features, designed to "completely destroy" enemy carriers, state media outlets reported on Tuesday.
"We have employed artificial intelligence within the software of the naval missile's trajectory planning," Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani announced at a televised ceremony in Tehran.
The ceremony marked the delivery of dozens of the projectiles to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iran's regular army, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
The missile is dubbed Abu Mahdi after Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraqi's Tehran-backed Popular Mobilization Units. Highly revered in Iran, al-Muhandis was killed along with Iran's top commander Qasem Soleimani when their convoy was hit by a US airstrike outside Baghdad's international airport in January 2020.
