You're listening to a stage talk titled Identifying Munitions in the War with Iran. This week, Bellingcat seasoned weapons expert Trevor Ball joined us on stage. He spoke about the many resources you can use to help verify weapon parts seen in imagery from a conflict and the mistakes many make when attempting this type of identification. He also shared insights from his reporting on the war between Israel, the US, and Iran so far, and answered community members' questions on how
they could responsibly cover it. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk in the podcast description. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Moll, on Thursday the 12th of March, 2026, in the Belencap Discord server. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it a low -cost unmanned combat attack system, or LUCAS, for short? Drones, missiles and bombs are flying and dropping out to the sky across the Gulf states
and the Levant. But how, as a researcher or journalist, do you know what is up there or falling down here? Well, hopefully today we can answer that. Bellingcat's Trevor Ball joins us. Trevor is a US Army veteran and a guru on munitions use and has been sharing that expertise in this very server for years. Right now his focus is on the unfolding conflict in Iran and the surrounding regions working daily to identify what weaponry
is being used and where. Today he's here to answer your questions but first let's unpack what he's found so far from identifying who is likely to blame for a strike to the use of never seen before armoury. We'll also try to cover times when people got it wrong, misidentifying remnants and debris is something else and why this misidentification
can happen. Before I pass over to him though, a short reminder that you can place your questions in the chat over on the right hand corner of your screen, but please remember that this is being audio recorded for the podcast. So if you don't want me to mention your username, please add that as a note in your question. Okay. Trevor, the stage is yours. All right. Thank you, Charlie. So I'm just going to get started talking about
some of the stuff we've seen so far. The most important thing to know is like while there have been new weapons seen in this war, some for the first time, it's been their first known use in combat. A lot of these are weapons that have been used for decades. They're very common. A
lot of countries use them. I think it was last week, we just did an article kind of summarizing some of the weapons we saw in the first few days, whether they're posted online on social media or posted by the various countries involved, either the US, Israel, or some of the Gulf countries were posting remnants. One of the most common ones we've seen is just the Mark 80 style bombs. It's kind of the most standard bomb used. by
Western countries and Israel. You can attach a bunch of different bomb guidance kits to them. This is actually a picture of the 500 pound Mark 82 with a JDAM kit on the left. On the right, you have the Bunker Buster version of the 2000 pound bomb. And that was the blue 109. Also just with a different JDAM kit. This is a bomb that the U .S. has. It's a glide bomb called the JSAL. That's one that we've seen quite a lot of them loading. This is one of the weapons that the
U .S. used for the very first time. It's called a Precision Strike Missile. It's a newer version of the Atacums that you might have heard a lot about being used in Ukraine. The U .S. gave quite a few, some that were originally made in the
1990s. One of the most important things about identifying weapons is Anytime there's remnants people will often claim that it's something it's not either because of ignorance or because they're trying to Basically claim that a another party was responsible for a strike In this article, we mentioned some of the earliest claims we saw such as a big one that happens in almost every conflict is that people will claim that a drop
pod from an aircraft is a missile or bomb. Essentially aircraft will have external fuel tanks that get mounted to them. And when they don't need them anymore, they just jettison them from the aircraft and they fall to the ground. And then people go, oh, that's a bomb. So this specific example of these, uh, the photo on the left and the photo on the top right, or of a Israeli fuel tank.
Um, one of the photos in the post shows a close -up of the marking, but It got claimed as a Israeli bomb and then this Iranian missile booster on the bottom right got claimed that it was also an Israeli missile when it's Iranian instead. So one of the things is just being able to identify these weapons or know where to look can help you kind of make sense of what's actually going on versus what posts might be claiming. Here's another one that was a Israeli missile booster.
that was reportedly found in Iraq. That's another important thing to note that like Iran is not the only country firing missile boosters or firing missiles with boosters. So not everything that falls to the ground is Iranian. You have drop tanks, you have Israeli missiles, they're using boosters. You have all these interceptor missiles being fired that fall to the ground either after
they miss or after they intercept. Here's a piece of a israeli era 2 interceptor And then you also have remnants of weapons that failed to get to their target I've seen four or five now Remnants of tomahawk missiles that reportedly failed to get to their target in either rock or syria And this is one of the most common pieces you'll see is the warhead because it's a lot denser so the missile will hit something and then the warhead will just keep going and stop usually
a bit away from where the rest of the remnants end up so one thing i like to do when i'm looking at a weapon i've been looking at them for a while now so like a lot of them i kind of have an idea of what they are if i don't know already but the osm -p has been documenting this war already they have a collection page for the current war, where all the weapon remnants they've found and they've verified with at least two different
experts they've posted here. And these show that, hey, these are associated with the war, this is what we're seeing so far. So this is a really good place to look immediately. Very quick, very easy. But also if you don't see it here, you can go back to previous conflicts the parties
have been involved with, as... Like I said, while a few of these weapons are being used for the first time, like this Lucas drone right here, which is the US B of the Shahed with some improvements, a lot of them have been used for decades and especially in the 12 -day war. So they also have a election page for the 12 -day war from June 2025, where you can see the remnants and weapon debris they verified from that conflict. So you're
going to see a lot of the same ones. and a lot of these weapons, while there might not be as many photos of from the current war yet, you can go out and use this as a reference. So here's some remnants of a GBU -39 bomb, the unexploded warhead specifically, but these bombs are being used in the current war as well. Here's the Israeli Mikulet they use a lot from their drones. So this has also been spotted in the current war,
but it's just an extra thing to go look at. and see what these countries have been using in the past. It can help you easier identify stuff. And there's a lot of good weapon debris on the OSMP from the Yemen 2025 strikes that the US conducted. See, here's the same blue 109s with JDAM kits. Here's the same 500 -pound bombs that we featured in our story from this current war, the first three days that the US released photos
of. And while I haven't seen pictures of the AGM 88 harm series yet, it's notable that they use these in Venezuela as well. So if you see something and it's not immediately in the collection page or in a recent article, it's worth going back and looking at past wars where these countries were involved and see if you see anything that matches that way. because even if these musicians haven't appeared yet, there's a good chance they might be being used and it just hasn't filtered
onto social media. There's really not that much coming out on social media from Iran outside of what state media is posting. And it's also very important to note that claims that state media will make or identifications they will make when they release photos aren't always accurate. They released a few photos claiming, hey, this is a downed drone, when in reality it was just a U .S. missile that crashed or blew up and they just got parts of it. Or you'll have them saying,
hey, this is a U .S. drone when it's Israeli or something like that. And a couple of the other sources I really like, aside from the open source
munitions portal. this is more of like more niche and more if you're trying to get some very good information or do more of like just a general visual search is i really like odin it's maintained by the us army training and doctrine command so essentially they just let you filter by different countries and different tracks so you can go to like iran you can be like all right um let's see what drones you have And this is all publicly
available information. So a lot of this just derived from like news reporting, but it's a very good and quick way to go get an idea of how to better, like a good starting point for what you're looking for. Like for example, the Hadid tent 110, these just got announced publicly by Iran last year, but there's already been photos
of them being used in conflict. One of the militia groups backed by Iran and Iraq just released photos and video of them launching them, which was the first time they were known to have them. I believe it was the Kuwait Ministry of Defense released photos that showed wreckage of one. So if you don't see it on the OSMP, there's another very good starting point to see if you can find any matches and then kind of try to do more of
a deeper dive for starting from there. One source that I really like and recommend is called Bullet Picker. All Bullet Picker is, is they have gathered publicly available documents from government resources and like some demining organizations and they've hosted it here. So they have the raw documents in the library, but they also have an ordinance section where you can go and see ordinance and All of the information here is pulled directly from these government documents
and it's linked to them. So anything here, you can go and see exactly where they're getting this information from. So they're pulling it from this technical manual from the US. They're pulling it from these manuals from the US. They might not have as much information, but the information they do have is very reliable. It's specifically what government sources have said, and they have a lot of drawings from the government that give
you exact measurements. Sometimes it's not as helpful for the much newer stuff, but when it comes to some of the stuff that's been used for decades, like here's the blue 109, you're going to get some very good, very reliable information. And then, one more thing that's been a hot topic is the Tomahawk missile. Bellingcat was the first to identify that a Tomahawk missile struck near the Manib school. Iranian media released a photo or the video saying, hey, this is the missile
that struck the school. We were able to show that, yes, that missile struck in the area, but that missile did not directly hit the school. When that missile impacted, smoke was rising in the vicinity of the school. That's a good indicator that that wasn't the first missile that had struck. Fatal eye imagery shows a bunch of buildings had been directly hit. We were basically able to identify that missile as a Tomahawk.
One of the main things about that is that Iranian missiles do not have an internal rocket motor
like the Tomahawk does. This is a tomahawk missile the current model since 2004 has been the block four with a block five and If you look at the bottom, you don't have any protrusion here and you just have a small opening Where it takes air to feed the engine because the engine is internal Ford of the fence where if you look at Iranian missiles, they all have a engine that's underneath so their engine is all external depending on the specific variant some of these will have
the engine internal like the KH -55 and then once it's fired that missile deploys from inside and it stays outside as the missile travels the Iranian derived versions the engine just stays attached to the bottom the whole time it doesn't deploy from internally So that's a very good visual difference that you can see. Where you don't have that protruded engine on the bottom. In the example that hit Manab school and you
don't have that on a Tomahawk missile. If this was an Iranian missile you would see that big protrusion that starts at the fins and continues
forward of the fins. So that's one of the most clearest examples that helps you Indicate that hey, this wasn't an Iranian cruise missile Another thing we did is that we actually tracked a bunch of tomahawks We geolocated I think total 10 total imagery of tomahawks Related to the war we found a bunch in Iraq traveling a kind of circular path where they seemingly went southeast of Kirkuk and then they're following one of two valleys down near the Iranian border, Iran -Iraq border,
before going into Iran to hit targets. And based on some experts we talked to and kind of their known range of these missiles, it's most likely they are fired from the Mediterranean. So it looks like they flew over Syria, over Iraq, and then into Iran before they hit targets. One thing to note is that Tomahawk missiles, they follow terrain guidance. So they have a GPS guidance, but they also are taking pictures of the terrain and referencing that to onboard memory to kind
of help determine where they are. So more prevalent terrain features like valleys and mountains help them better determine where they're at accurately. And it helps hide them from being detected by radar or shot down from air defenses. So another claim we saw lately was that the missile that hit near Manab came from a less direct path from where the carrier group in the Arabian Sea was
operating. But these missiles, by the most basic Navy information that they probably say are designed to fly at low speeds, they're designed to take
evasive routes. As we've seen tracking these tomahawks and as the military has specifically stated they're designed They don't have to take direct routes They often will take indirect routes to be harder to detect and take advantage of the terrain for guidance and to protect them from being detected by air defenses and going back to one thing about the new weapons is that
Especially related to tomahawks. We've seen some new stuff that wasn't publicly known before so One modification that has appeared is it looks like they're tomahawks, but that the wings are facing forward instead of back. Obviously, this wasn't known to be a modification before, but a lot of analysts, including the Warzone, have suggested that this is a modification made to make them harder to be detected by radar. Another thing that was seen was a all -black missile.
All Black Tomahawk, which is believed to be a stealth coding, which also wasn't publicly known before. So, you know, sometimes there is new things. So you might not actually find an exact copy and you know, the open source munitions portal or Odin or bullet picker, but try to find what's similar and try to see like, Hey, what similar changes have been made because that Black Tomahawk is new, but other weapons have a similar stealth coding which makes people think this
is also intended to be a stealth coding. And then of a more weirder one that's still a puzzle is Israel released a some photos of what fits the same form and shape of a standard Mark 84 2000 pound bomb but this one has red bands and it's not known specifically if this is it but this color scheme matches what's known as a US crash pad. It's a bomb designed to destroy chemical and biological agents. And it does that by having a small amount of explosives, but a large amount
of white phosphorus. So we reached out to the IDF for comment. They refused to comment about what specific munition it was or give us any details, but a couple weapons experts we talked to basically said, hey, you know, like this indicates an incendiary bomb. These are the markings they use for it. We just can't say specifically what its purpose is, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the crash pad. That's a known bomb that has
these markings that looks this way. But we still don't know exactly what it is or how they're being used. And that's all I have. Or I could just keep rambling because I've gone about weapons for way too long. I know, I know, and I really appreciate it. But let's go to some questions. One of the main questions, and I think we should address it to start with, because we've been asked this constantly the last few weeks, is how do you know what governments have which weapons?
Obviously, Trump went out and said that lots of different countries have Tomahawks, and we've explicitly said it's a US Tomahawk. So how do we know what governments have access to and what they don't? A simple question, but with perhaps a complex answer. Well, it sort of depends on which countries you're looking at because some countries are much more open about the weapons
they supply and how they do it. The US is typically a lot more open about their weapons transfers, major arm sales, unless they're classified, get published by the US government. You know, there was some recent reporting that the U .S. authorized the sale of, you know, I think it was about a total of a little over 10 ,000 more bombs to Israel. And they, you know, gave specific models. So you have some stuff like that, or you'll have
media reporting. There's the Stockholm Institute of Peace has a arms transfer database where they basically collate that. And you can go back and see what publicly reported weapons have gone where. So, you know, like with the crash pad, there's no, this incendiary bomb, there's no evidence we could find publicly of Israel getting that bomb by the US. So we specifically asked the state department, hey, did, was this ever
transferred? You know, they declined to comment, but that's always one thing to ask is just because it's not public doesn't mean it didn't happen. But you can make a reasonable effort to try to see if there's any evidence of that, whether, you know, publicly disclosed transfers or, you know, reporting. I think Reuters did a good one on some transfers that weren't publicly disclosed. When it comes to other stuff, sometimes governments will basically post what weapons they're seizing.
An important one is the US has posted images of a lot of weapons they've seized going to the Houthis in Yemen. They have been shipped by Iran. So sometimes you'll see new stuff pop up there. It's one of those things that Just because a country hasn't been reported with it before doesn't mean they can't have something now. So there's always a element of uncertainty, but there are some things you can do to try to see if it has been known to have it before. Yeah, thanks for
that. Doesn't unfortunately stop Trump making sweeping statements, however. We've had some questions about the incendiary bomb. article that you've got currently up right now. So I thought I'd ask that at the minute. If I recall correctly, white phosphorus munitions are restricted under the Geneva conventions and related protocols. Yet there have been reports that Israel has continued
using these types of weapons. What does international law actually say about the use of white phosphorus and would such use violate these conventions? So we actually spoke to two different legal experts specifically about the use of an incendiary bomb and the crash pad even more specifically. And they essentially said that neither Israel or Iran are a party to the specific subsection that would make the use of incendiary weapons illegal.
And that the US basically did sign it, but they signed it with reservations where they basically said, we will still use these if we deem it is necessary and in accordance with principles. There's one main thing about a crash pass The intent is to destroy chemical and biological agents by the high heat Instead of you bombing a chemical biological weapon storage area and dispersing those chemical and biological agents So that's at least the intent behind the crash
pad. It's very hard to say Exactly what Israel is using this bomb for or what the intent is An incendiary weapon can mean a bunch of things. It could mean that it is a crash pad. It could mean that they just have a much smaller incendiary effect. So without knowing more that just gets into a bunch more speculation. If you want to read specifically what the two experts told us about the legality, it's an article about this.
There's also some links in here that give even more details about like the US reservations. We've got a bunch of questions coming into the chat now, but before we get to them, I wondered if we could just take a step back. If I gave you, if I found a low resolution video of a missile in flight, what are the first physical features
you as an analyst are looking for? What would be your first port of call if you found a video online that... was claiming to be a specific missile and you wanted to fact check that or verify it. So my thing is, is first off always to look at the video quality first because one common thing is the US strikes in the Caribbean. They've keep releasing videos of that, but most of the time the munitions are moving so fast. That's just a blur. And that's on high quality
video. Some of these videos that people are taking are very low quality. So that The quality specifically is going to greatly affect what you can confidently say about it. But generally, I always look for the general shape and the size. It's going to vary how specific or confident you can get depending on the quality. But I want to know roughly how big is it? And what are the main characteristics I can see? Do I see wings? Because that's a big one. If you see wings, then you're looking more
like a missile or a glide bomb. If it just looks like a cylindrical object, you know, without any wings, then maybe you're looking more just a more typical bomb. And the size can help you kind of get a general ballpark to look at. But again, it's going to significantly vary where you can go for more general based on the quality. But it's very important to know that objects moving fast, especially with, depending on the video, it might blur certain features and it
might elongate the object. So, you know, some of those strikes in the Caribbean have been reported to be very small bombs. They're just a couple of feet long. And then, you know, I've seen some people say, oh, that's a tomahawk, which is like 20 feet long. So that's just an important thing to realize. Pay attention to munitions sizes and things like that. And also look for comparable imagery as well. In terms of If you don't have, if that video isn't clear enough, what other
corresponding imagery could help? For example, it's me Ian in the chat has asked, can you use photos of damage to identify munitions? Is it even possible to tell a difference? For example, looking at the crater that a bomb might have left. Yeah. So you can use photos and damage to identify munitions, but kind of similar to the quality. and what you have specifically you might be able to get in the ballpark or you might be able to identify a specific munition because
some munitions have very distinct effects. One of the Israeli versions of the Mikulet bomb that they use from drones as cubic fragmentation lining the warhead so when that specific version of the Mikulet is used you see a lot of those very kind of like consistent fragmentation pattern in all directions, which can be a very good clue,
and you have a very small hole of anything. So like when it comes to something like that, especially if it's in an area where only like, like in Gaza, where Israel is the only one operating drones and conducting airstrikes, then it's a lot easier
to be more confident in that answer. But when you're looking at something like Ukraine, where there's an absolute ton of weapons being used, there's new stuff being developed, You have random soldiers on the front lines just kind of putting together drone munitions in haphazard ways using
whatever they can find. That's going to be a lot more difficult to find out specifically what it was without a more forensic style investigation where you actually are collecting, you know, samples of explosive residue, collecting every single fragment you can find and actually seeing
what you have. When it comes to craters, One thing is in a lot of reporting you might see people saying hey, this was like a 2 ,000 pound bomb or equivalent Essentially, they're just saying the damage is consistent with that explosive Those are the most kind of like common and standard weapons, but other weapons might have similar warhead strengths So another thing to note is like a 2 ,000 pound bomb That doesn't mean it
has 2 ,000 pounds of explosives. That's the general weight for it almost every time you hear 2 ,000 pound 100 pound 1 ,000 pounds 500 that's the general weight of the warhead or the bomb the explosive is a lot less than that um typically it's like 40 to 50 percent if even less so the the 2 ,000 pound mark 84 bomb for example has about 980 pounds of explosives but if you're looking at the blue 109 2000 pound bunker buster bomb it has even less than that I think it's
more like 500 pounds. So that's an important thing to note, but people often use those, the Mark 80 series, like the 2000 pound, the 1000 pound is a good reference because they're used so often. And there's a good bit of data about roughly the crater sizes that they produce. So the crater sizes can also vary based on how the soil there, the type of fusing that it is. because these bombs can be equipped to explode in different
ways. They can explode in the air for air burst, they can explode on contact with hitting a building or the ground, or even if it's not a bunker buster, it might be intended to explode after a short delay on contact where it penetrates the ground a little bit. And all of those are going to increase or decrease the kind of contact with the ground and can make the crater larger or smaller. So that's basically just a roundabout way of saying
it really depends. And without like, you know, a forensic or remnants of the weapon that you can verify came from the site, you're only going to be able to get within a certain ballpark generally. Yeah, which was the case when we looked at a possible crater in a hostile blasting Gaza, we could only really suggest that it slightly ruled out some of the larger bombs because of the size of it, which I put the link of in the chat for those live listening. In terms of debris and
remnants left behind, how reliable is that? If you find an image shed after the attack, how reliable can you take that information? For example, the case of the girls school in Iran, we analyzed an image that was shared by Iranian authorities with debris and remnants on the table that were found in that particular area or was said to be found in that particular area. So what can you take from this kind of imagery and what should
you avoid doing? And have you seen cases where governments deliberately mislabeled debris to shape the narrative around a strike? So the important thing is when was the debris found and can you find it in the immediate aftermath? And does the debris Does the weapon the debris is showing make sense for the strike? Those are the two things like octas look at. You know, with this, we don't know when this photo was taken. It was released, you know, almost two weeks after the
strike occurred. And you can very clearly see that most of the debris has been cleared. It looks much different than videos taken in the immediate aftermath. So it's very hard to say where this debris came from. You know, one thing in Gaza, particularly you'll have a lot of journalists or media influencers running into where airstrikes
happen. So you'll be seeing, you know, uh, the people that were just killed by this airstrike and you might catch like, uh, glimpses of the remnants on the ground, or you might have someone picking someone up like while they're still pulling bodies out. and that makes you be a lot more confident to say like, hey, this remnant was associated with the strike because you can see it in the immediate aftermath. Whereas something like this, you know, we can't independently pie
these remnants to this specific strike. We know that a tomahawk hit one of the other buildings nearby, but we can't specifically say that these
remnants are from this building. So like that's important thing to acknowledge and try to assess what you can say about where the remnants came from and what's possible We can't say these are Tomahawk missile remnants We mash them up with previous remnants The New York Times did a very good piece where they tied some of the specific numbers that were visible in the photos To contracts for the Tomahawk missile from Ball Aerospace So like that's another good thing to say hey,
this is a Tomahawk missile Now the next question is does it make sense? Does the weapon they're purporting to show remnants of does that fit the strike, you know? Did it do that this damage is it way too small? Is there anything fishy about that? That's always a common thing That says even if you can see that aftermath. It's like if you're trying to tell me like a small 60 millimeter mortar took down this whole building.
I would say absolutely not. I don't believe you for a second But, you know, Tomahawks have 300 -pound warheads of explosives. They can destroy significant amount of structures. So, like, this kind of fits. We know that another Tomahawk hit nearby. We just can't say where these remnants came from specifically. Debris and remnant analysis becoming easier or harder as weapons are becoming more modular or stealth oriented. Are you finding it more difficult to identify key parts of missiles?
Not really. If anything, it sort of helps because in the most simplistic terms, the more complex munition is, the more parts you will have that might survive the explosion and be identifiable. So if you look at a Mark 84 bomb, it is, or let's just use this blue 109 example. The whole green part is the bomb body. So that is just steel filled with explosives. And then the grayish parts are the parts of the bomb guidance kit
that gets attached onto it. So when that bomb explodes, you're going to find fragments of the bomb body, but that's a lot harder to identify. especially if you're just looking at photos, but the guidance kits have a lot of components that are farther away from the bomb, from the explosives. So those are more likely to survive and be in a recognizable form. And also they
might get sheared off on impact. You know, if this bomb hits a building and it's on a delayed fusing, the bomb might penetrate a floor or two before exploding, but the JDAM kit might get ripped off when it first hits the roof. So, you know, that gives a much better chance of that remnant surviving. And missiles are just a much more complex version of that, especially Tomahawks. So, you know, like one example here is that this blue piece right here is part of the engine.
And if you look at photos of Tomahawks, that's about as far back from the actual warhead as you can get. So all of those extra pieces in these like complex missiles that are very large with all these guidance kits and all these wings, it just gives you Extra remnants that have a better chance of surviving intact that you might
be able to identify And the u .s. Specifically has a lot of different subcontractors and they have a lot of different um codes that they'll put on the missile and stuff that you can usually use via open sources to find What weapons it's associated with? for example, uh the hellfire missile and the the newer kind of similar version the jagum they Lockheed Martin reports that they have over 270 suppliers in the US supplying parts
for that missile. And you know, the Hellfire is a lot less complex than something like a Tomahawk missile. So to keep it short, the less sophisticated munitions are usually the ones that are harder to get a conclusive ID on when you're just looking at it from photos. That's really useful to know. And for those listening back to the podcast, you can find the link to these images that Trevor's just been talking about in the podcast description.
Zara's just asked a follow -up to that. How might we go about identifying those specific pieces? Will reverse image search help us to find the open sources that tell us about these individual pieces? So I haven't actually tried reverse image searching these ones just because I used to work at Ares on the open source munitions portal. So I was working there during the US strikes in Yemen. So I've spent a lot of time looking at Tomahawk missile parts, especially like relatively
recently, even before this war. So I was like, okay, this is a Tomahawk missile. So I just went and like double checked, make sure I wasn't missing anything. But for stuff like remnants, my first place would be the open source munitions portal. You can either go generally, but If you're more getting new into this, I would just go to one of the war collection pages. So look, they've already added the ones from the school. All right, they haven't added any ones from that. But if
we go to Yemen, there's some from here. So here is some of the same parts from Tabahag missiles that were fired in Yemen. Here's the same loader component. So that's the first place I would go. It's very easy to kind of clue in and help
you know if you're on the right track. And then what the New York Times did is this fragment at the top right that actually has a visible contract code and they looked up the contract and found that it was associated with a contract that started delivering this component in 2014
for Tomahawk missiles. Since then a video has come out of these same components, but it shows them in more detail So you can even get more information about the actual markings on it So it really just depends on what components you have the quality of the imagery Because if you didn't have that little gray data plate visible, then it would be a bit harder to try to find it Just based off markings Sometimes they'll have what's called a cage code, which is a five
digit code And that indicates the contractor that made that component. So Raytheon's cage code is 15090. You can actually go to this website, cagedla .mil, and you can search the specific cage codes. So you search it, boom, that's Raytheon. And then it gives you details like this. So if you see something like that, the Raytheon cage code that you know Raytheon, made that component. But like I said earlier with, you know, the Hellfire example, multiple companies will work on these
missiles and components. So if you see multiple different cage codes, that doesn't mean that, you know, it's like different munitions. That just means that multiple contractors made parts for that. But like that's another good indicator is There's what's called the prime contractors and they're the ones that are responsible overall for the weapon that got the contract. So, Tomahawk
Missiles, Raytheon is the prime contractor. But, you know, Ball Aerospace is a subcontractor that made that GPS component that the New York Times looked at. So, there's kind of differences there, but that can also help key you in. You know, if someone's saying, hey, this is this certain weapon and there's a cage code on it and the cage code comes back to, you know, Lockheed Martin and they're saying it's a tomahawk. Well, does Lockheed Martin have anything to do with that?
That's always like a good thing that can help you kind of like start looking. And there, there's a lot of good reporting about cage codes and some of the other markings, um, especially from, uh, the previous human strikes, uh, you know, like a decade ago, Bellingcat did some good stuff with, um, the paveway bomb guidance kits that were being supplied. It was even found via cage code that an Italian company was making some of the bombs that were being used. Super useful.
And I've just linked that site in the chat and I'll make sure it's included in the podcast description as well. Only about 20 minutes left. So if you have questions, keep them coming in. We've got a few to get through. I wanted to ask quickly though, as we're talking about identification, in terms of new variants of familiar weapons. What kind of visual differences might indicate, what are the most common visual differences that might indicate something as a familiar weapon,
but a new variant? How do you kind of spot that? So generally it's a lot harder. Cause you know, you might say you have like a Hellfire missile
is a great example. People will just say a hellfire, but there are an absolute ton of variants of the hellfire with a bunch of different changes It's been in use for decades So, you know, you'll have different small differences into the rocket motor to give it a little bit of extra range or like the actual components and you also have different warheads, so When someone says a hellfire or like a small diameter bomb like a gbu -39 It's important to realize that usually those
are more general terms and there's a bunch of different versions within that. So trying to find out usually like what is a new variant is going to be very difficult unless it's very specific. You know like the Hellfire R9X like Ninja missile that's a very good example because that's a very distinctly different modification that wasn't known before and there's no prior information about that. So it's very clearly like, it's pretty easy to say, yes, this is new. This is different.
And you have a marking on that. Some of the debris when that came out specifically says Hellfire on or R9X on it. So you can say, Hey, this is new. Or like the, the Tomahawk, apparent Tomahawk missile with like the four swept wings. Like that is a very obvious, visibly different missile. But a lot of the times it's not going to be very easy to determine without a lot of work or like very good quality photos or maybe even like several different examples of remnants. Good to know.
Jake Golden, our colleague, has also written in the chat a useful point. It's also useful to know what you can find out via numbers on non -US munitions like Russian cruise missiles. ConflictArmentResearch did a good field investigation on the KH101 here and he's linked to a story map. So I will make sure that that's also featured in the description of the podcast. A few questions here in general about the conflict with Iran. I'm not sure how much you know about this Trevor,
but perhaps we can kind of address it. Someone's asked, because of the widespread internet shutdown, what methods can OSINT researchers use to identify and obtain reliable sources or information from inside the country? And another person's asked if you can talk a little bit more about the ways some of the missiles and drones are being intercepted in the region. Are you able to talk to that? Yeah, so as far as the kind of like OSINT methods we can use to obtain and reliable sources of
information. I think the Manab school video showing the tomahawk is a good example because that was released by Iranian state media amidst an internet shutdown. So it's important to assess what these videos are showing and how you can verify them. The specific video was released saying that it showed the school being struck specifically.
We were able to show that no the school isn't being struck specifically in that video but it is of the same area and that there's doesn't appear to be any AI tampering, it appears to be legitimate. There is damage in the area where the missile hit. So that's one good way of just taking in information that you're finding with a critical lens and seeing what you can actually say about it. The other good one is satellite
imagery. There's been Some satellite services are delaying publications, but some still doing it but even then that's a great way to verify what's happening because Iran is releasing what they want just like Israel and the DOD is releasing
video they want showing strikes. So, you know, like they've said they the US said they carried out over 5 ,000 strikes now, but the image the videos and images they really showing those strikes is substantially less than 5 ,000, you know, so it's It's important to kind of keep in context in your frame of mind what you're actually seeing in comparison to how big this scale is. We're seeing a very small proportion of everything
that's happening. So I'd say just verifying what you can and acknowledging what you can't say or how limited your view is. But I'd say satellite imagery is probably like one of the best things we can use right now just because you can get the best view on what's happening at a more general level. Um, as far as the interceptions go, so there's a lot of different systems being used.
Um, so the iron dome and some of the other systems are more designed to take out like drones and smaller rockets, but then you have ballistic missile defenses, you know, like the U S thad, the, um, the Patriot. So some of these work by you're essentially firing a missile and that
missile explodes and tries to blow up. You know the drone or the rocket like that's how the iron dome works a lot of the ballistic missile defenses um, like the the patriots and um the fad and the arrow They work by what's called hit to kill where they're trying to hit the incoming Missile directly and that's how they destroy it by the kinetic impact You can see some of the remnants of those, as you mentioned earlier, falling as well into across the regions as they try to defend
some horrific imagery coming out across the region. A question that we had at the very beginning of the talk, which I think kind of fits now. is with the rapid rise of AI -generated content and deepfakes, what steps should OSINT investigators take to verify that the information they are analyzing is authentic rather than AI -generated or manipulated? You mentioned just then the fact that we do see manipulated and recycled imagery actually as well in any conflict. So how do you
avoid being tricked by AI, for example? I mean, I think the best example when it comes to like munition remnants as a first image search, all the AI stuff I've seen like claiming to specifically be weapons or like remnants has been pretty bad so far. But, you know, there is always like people trying to reuse debris. There is a very popular example that didn't make it into our article, but someone was reusing a video from Ukraine.
saying it was a drone that hit Cyprus and Russia was supplying Iran with their version of the Shahed. So that was a very important thing that people fact checked and were able to say like, no, this wasn't. And as far as I know, I still haven't seen the original video, but a photo from that video of the remnant matched an article from 2024, which is how people were able to identify, hey, this is reused. So like, My biggest thing
would be, you know, extreme claims. I would definitely be a lot more cautious of, and, you know, would want to spend a lot more time looking into to validate that it's actually real, you know, and also looking at the source of where it's coming from. Like, Hey, um, why is this, uh, for example, like I saw it being shared by Ukraine account, like pro -Ukraine accounts saying, Hey, this is a Shahed and Cyprus. Well. Where did this come from? Is this actually being posted by media
in Cyprus? Where are you claiming you got it from? And this kind of goes back to one of my biggest beefs with the current information space around open source is that a lot of people don't cite their sources, which makes everyone have to waste a lot of time trying to verify where this information is from. If everyone cited their sources, then you could very quickly find out who's spreading this information. or better evaluate
how reliable the sources. Always link your sources guys in here and on other social platforms, please. In terms of our latest report in which you showed it in your talk where we had mapped out tomahawks flying over Iraqi airspace, possibly Syria and also how did we kind of get an estimate about the actual missiles, the number of missiles flying over. How can you distinguish between multiple missiles versus kind of the same missile captured from different angles or in different clips?
Is it possible to get an accurate estimate of how many you might be seeing in a given area? So we went with the most conservative estimate if we could more reliably be confident in the exact times that the videos were filmed then we could Better assess that but we weren't able to be confident enough that the video showed different or unique waves So what we did was is we just went with the minimum tally we could
in each area. So just in these seven or eight videos alone The total tally was something like 70 missiles spotted. But since we couldn't determine for sure if they showed different waves at different times or what, we just went with the number of tomahawks we could identify in a single video, which one video showed 20. We just went with at least 20 tomahawks. And then we had a crash one here, which if it crashes in Syria, it won't be able to be flying in Iraq. So we counted 21
here. in Iraq and Syria. And then we counted one in Manab and then 13 flew over. We passed a ship a few days later. So our total count we went with was 35 at least. And we counted six over Tehran, but again, we couldn't determine for sure that it wasn't six of the ones we saw over here. So we went with the most conservative count we could just because we couldn't reliably
determine anything more specific than that. And you can see the specific locations in that interactive map made by our brilliant colleague Logan Williams as well, if you click into the link. Cyber has put in the chat, I think the open source information would be reduced by about 80 % once you remove copied plagiarized content and only leave genuine original content. Somebody else has just asked, do we know whether any of these munitions incorporate
GPS guidance or tracking systems? If so, is it possible to identify the manufacturers or vendors and determine technical details such as the frequencies of communication bands those systems might use? I don't know if you can determine the frequency or communication bands. That's outside my knowledge. But you can see who makes the GPS systems and stuff like that. There's another great remnant that shows one from a JASM missile, and it also shows that the GPS system, at least in part,
is made by Ball Aerospace. Sorry, my tabs are a mess, but yeah, right here. JASM slash GPS antenna, so Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation, and then there's their CAGE code. So you have 13993, and that's something you could plug into CAGE .dll .mil. And then here's the contract number, here's the part number. Those are all good things you can look up. Say if you had a similar remnant that the ball thing was obscured, you could get a good idea who made it with all
that other information. We've been asked if you could link that in the chat. It's amazing what detail remains after explosions. Hey, really useful. Oh, I see Jake's already done it. Thank you, Jake. Amazing. We're coming close to time actually. A couple of people in the chat have said that they could listen to you speak for
hours. But I wanted to just start to wrap up the talk a little, talking about how, for example, if someone's listening and they want to kind of really become an expert in this space, what kind of skill sets do you need to become a specialist in munitions analysis? What kind of things do you need to train on? To get where you are, Trevor. Um, I would say one thing is just, um, look a lot, like look at the OSMP try to find out if you're unsure how they're getting to an answer,
try to find out why. But at the most basic level, I would say it helps a lot if you can kind of get a, even a basic understanding of what types of weapons are delivered by what systems. So,
you know. Some are like like the tomahawk is fired by ships Some bombs are dropped by aircraft and then you have like artillery so if you kind of look into that and understand like what makes a rocket or a missile versus a bomb and how those are delivered there's kind of a logic to weapons and the more you can understand that kind of like the faster you can find the right line of inquiry to follow and just I've heard some people say that like geolocations are vibes based sometimes
munitions can be the same way when you get started where you can look at something and just be like this kind of feels like this and you know you can kind of just use that as a starting point and see if you can find something that actually reinforces that vibe you'd be like this kind of looks like more sophisticated more complex like maybe it's a missile this country operates there like maybe i can start looking at that way whereas oh you know this looks very cheap
it has um Maybe not as good construction. Maybe that's you know, like an Iranian drone that they're firing or supplying to their the militia groups they support so There's kind of a lot of just time you have to spend learning the basic logic
of how these weapons work. They're all bound by you know Scientific constraints so all of them kind of do some of the same things to achieve desired weapons effects To maximize like range versus what they can carry So there was kind of a weird logic you can kind of learn and you can just kind of get used to what certain types
of components look like. Jake has said in the chat, when looking at Russian munitions in Ukraine, it was very useful personally to collect and follow every source where images of munitions were showing up, such as Ukrainian emergency service pages for each oblast or even the police prosecutor's offices for the oblast. They tended to show ammunition remnants to show damage from attacks on civilians infrastructure and whatnot. And that was useful for finding more imagery
to compare slash analyze. Just to finish, Trevor, as we're coming to time, what's been your kind of proudest moment as an analyst? What kind of detail did you spot that others didn't, that led to an identification or something surprising that you found? Honestly, I'd say probably one of my proudest would be Al Maghazi. There was a strike in April, 2024 that hit on a street where a bunch of children were playing foosball,
and killed a bunch of children and two men. And Israel denied operating in the area, or carrying out a strike in the area, and there were some remnants. And I didn't have good reference imagery of the remnants at the time, so I went to geoconfirmed and I looked through every single airstrike that they had geolocated, and I marked out the ones that were too big of an explosion for the munition that was used. And the ones that fit, I spent more time digging into each of those strikes
to try to find remnants. And I was able to basically match components from those strikes to Mikulet. And those components matched the one at Almagazi. So I basically was able to determine, hey, this matched an Israeli Mikulet, even after saying that they didn't carry out a strike in that area. And it was really time consuming because it was earlier into the conflict and I hadn't spent
a lot of time. learning about that munition or like saving a bunch of reference images didn't have as much, but I think that was probably the practice for me. Wow. Yeah. Important work. If you have a link to that, please pop it in the chat. And thank you so, so much for going, going into detail about your process and also how other and the resources that you use and how other people can make use of them too. Really, really useful talk, especially at the moment as everyone's
got their eyes on the conflict. in the Middle East. And yeah, we'll be back in two weeks time with another Stage Talk. But for now, thank you very much, Trevor. I can't wait to see what you put out next. And thank you everybody for listening. Yeah, thanks everyone for showing up. Have a good one. Thank you for listening to the Stage Talk. If you'd like to catch a Stage Talk live... where you can ask the guest questions. Join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord
.gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.