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The Pentagon is investigating whether a U.S. Navy Joint Standoff Weapon that reportedly costs over $2 million missed its intended target during strikes in southern Iran and instead hit a nearby home where a wedding was taking place.
Six AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons, or JSOWs, were dropped by U.S. Navy aircraft toward a communications complex in the coastal town of Kuhestak on September 1, according to new reporting from The Washington Post. Five reportedly struck the target area while one appeared to go astray.
An explosion tore through the roof of a home roughly 135 meters away from the communications site, where dozens of people had gathered for a wedding celebration.
Iranian officials and media reported initial deaths of four people—two women and two children ages 4 and 16—with a fifth later dying of injuries. Dozens more, including many women and children among more than 60–70 wounded, were wounded.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) acknowledged carrying out a wave of strikes in the southern region of the Islamic Republic on that specific day.
In its September 1 announcement, CENTCOM said strikes targeted Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps air-defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites after attempted attacks against commercial shipping and U.S. troops.
CENTCOM has not publicly accepted responsibility for the wedding strike, however. Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesman, told The Washington Post that the command was aware of reports of civilian casualties and was looking into them, adding that the U.S. military does not target civilians.
Vice President JD Vance also confirmed last week that the U.S. military was investigating the deadly strike on the wedding.
“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” Vance told reporters Thursday. He said that when the U.S. military makes mistakes, it works to learn from them.
Reuters had independently examined verified imagery from the scene before the latest details emerged. Four weapons experts told the news agency that damage to the home was consistent with a munition detonating directly on or immediately above the roof rather than debris ricocheting from the nearby communications tower. Three said the evidence favored a U.S. weapon over an errant Iranian air-defense missile.
Reuters also reported that former Army explosive ordnance disposal technician Trevor Ball identified some weapons remnants shown by Iranian media as parts associated with a JSOW.
A more recent photo from Iranian media revealed that the JSOW’s latest version, the AGM-154C-1, was the weapon used in the deadly strike.
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The JSOW is an air-launched, unpowered glide weapon designed for standoff attacks. The AGM-154C-1, which reportedly could cost upwards of $2.9 million, uses GPS-aided inertial guidance with an imaging infrared terminal seeker and a data link that allows updates in flight. It can attack fixed or certain moving targets from distances of roughly 22 kilometers at low altitude to more than 100 kilometers at high altitude.
The weapon carries a multi-stage BROACH warhead in the roughly 225-kilogram class intended for hardened or fixed targets.
The wedding strike underscores the broader inefficiency of the U.S. campaign against Iran, both in its reliance on extremely expensive precision weapons and, at the same time, its failure to prevent civilian casualties.
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