Angry Planet - Just how strong is Iran’s military?

Episode Date: September 9, 2015

This week’s War College examines the state of Iran’s conventional military, as well as its guiding strategies. Jason Fields, Matthew Gault and Robert Beckhusen also discuss the likely impact of the nuclear treaty on its regular forces.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. If Iran's conventional forces were to, say, hypothetically, in theory, move into Iraq, they would find themselves fighting an enemy that fights a very different kind of style. of war than they're accustomed to.

I'm Jason Fields, Reuters opinion editor, and today I'm talking with Matt Galt and Robert Beckhousin of War is Boring. We're going to talk about how the Iran nuclear deal could change Iran's military and whether other countries in the region should worry. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. So, Matt, can you tell us a little bit about what Iran's military looks like now and what it could look like in the future?

We're talking about this because of the Iran nuclear deal, right? It's caused a lot of furor. There's a diplomatic agreement that's going to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions, but it will also end years of sanctions and most controversially longstanding trade embargoes which prevented Iran from buying and selling weapons on the global market. So, you know, in the past few weeks, after the deal was a deal, announced. You've seen all a lot of news outlets, headlines such as nuclear deals end to Iran embargo, worries Pentagon over at military.com. L.A. Times ran an op-ed title The Consequences of a Bad Deal

with Iran, and you even see clickbait headlines such as five Iranian weapons of war America should fear. But there's scary sounding, but there's a lot of questions. One is who exactly is going to sell Iran the weapons. Obviously, the answer is Russia and China. But Russia only stopped selling to Iran in 2010. So for Moscow, it's going to be kind of a return to business as usual. It's not like Iran is this huge growth market for their weapons. There's also the question of how Iran will pay for the weapons. You know, they will, of course, get their oil industry back up to speed, but the energy's market now is not what it was even just five years ago. So the better and more interesting questions, I think, are what is the current state of Iranian's military?

What are they looking to buy? How do Iran's leaders want to use the military, especially in the region? And how does that military stack up against Iran's rivals in the region? So I will kind of turn that over to Robert for the, for the, for the, for the, the big picture of you. Well, war and conflict by nature is unpredictable. So a military is designed to do specific things depending on countries' own perceptions of what the threats are. And for Iran, those threats are principally the United States and its immediate regional rivals. So Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates, you know, and Bahrain and others. So

when we're talking about, you know, the Iranian military, we need to put it in that context. So that being said, Iran has the largest military in the Persian Gulf region. It's about a half a million troops. I mean, the numbers vary because there's the regular army, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and there's also the besieged paramilitary force. So full-time war strength is actually more than one million soldiers under arms. But it's heavily defensive oriented. So what that means is that they practice what's called a defense in depth in which you attempt to lure an invader in to the country and then slow them down over the length of the country. So almost like if you think of Soviet Union during World War II or Russia and Napoleon, it's this large military cannot predict.

project power abroad very effectively, but it's very good at repelling an invader, which Iran did in the 1980s in a war with Iraq. And many of Iran's senior military commanders are veterans of that war. So they're very experienced, and they know how to fight a conflict like that. But again, when we're talking about projecting power abroad, it's a totally different story. Also, Iran lacks a lot of technology and equipment to maintain a military beyond its borders. Its military hardware is very old. It's antiquated. Much of it dates the time of the Shah, actually, which makes a lot of it American.

But sanctions and inability to buy hardware abroad, with the exception of a few clients like Russia and China, has made the Iranian military's just hardware. a little rickety. So, okay, so the United States used to be the biggest supporter of the Shah of Iran, which actually now it's been so long, people may not, a lot of people may not actually know that. That up until 1979, we were military allies. We actually helped prop up his regime. We supported them in foreign endeavors, whatever they might have been.

And as a matter of fact, it's because we sort of supported this very, very brutal regime that the Iranians dislike us so much now, right? So when you're talking about equipment that's left over, you're talking about stuff from the 70s or even the 60s. Is that right, Robert? The 70s was, there was a big surge of hardware into Iran. The United States sold a lot of hardware in the 70s. So we're talking F-14 fighter jets, F-4 fighters, tanks, you know, helicopters. And, you know, Iran is a big, well-educated country. I mean, and they've, the military has done some pretty remarkable stuff to keep this stuff flying.

So I think the total numbers of F-14s, which the United States no longer uses, I mean, this is the famous plane from Top Gun, has around 43, but about half of them are probably serviceable or, you know, capable of flying. But, you know, it's pretty remarkable. I mean, but some of it's also kind of for show. So they have hundreds of bell helicopters. I mean, these are air ambulances that you might see flying over your city. But there they've camouflaged them and added rockets. They call them attack helicopters.

You see the Forest News Agency, state-run news agency, promote these. as a new attack helicopter, but it's pretty much a refurbished air ambulance, the United States sold in the 1970s. So, I mean, some of this is for show. You don't want to overstate the utility of some of it. I'd say the Navy is sort of in a similar situation. I mean, it's large.

It's the largest Navy in the Persian Gulf, but it relies heavily on small boats, submarines, and small craft missile boats that can effectively practice swarming tactics. And essentially it's like a lot of insects all buzzing around you. And you might be able to swat, you know, most of them, but all it takes is a few to get through and they could, you know, sink your ship. So totally different than, you know, when if you're talking about a Navy, most people in the United States, we're thinking about ships that are, I mean, huge

and hundreds of people are on them. And it just doesn't look anything like that, right? I mean, we wouldn't think of it necessarily as a Navy at all. It's a raiding force is what it is, principally. I mean, it's designed to engage in a war of attrition in the Persian Gulf with its rivals shipping and could pose a threat to the U.S. Navy. But in terms of a conventional threat, I mean, that could project power beyond the Persian Gulf or even move troops across the Persian Gulf is very limited.

Right. Okay. And I just say, though, that, of course, when you say shipping, you mean oil. Oil ships, oil ships, container ships. I mean, this was not unprecedented. I mean, in the 1980s, Iran and Iraq fought. It's called the so-called tanker war in which both Iraq and Iran targeted shipping in the Persian Gulf that was real or perceived belonged to their enemy. And so, I mean, and the U.S. Navy, I mean, this is something that the U.S. Navy is trained for four years and actually engaged in, you know, in the war.

So there was skirmishes between the U.S. Navy and Iran at the time. You've been talking a lot about that they had, it's a very defensive military, that they don't have the kind of military you would use to project power in the region. But that doesn't mean that they don't militarily project power, right? They have, they just kind of do it with commandos. Right. So, I mean, one of the principal, like, forces, we've seen in Iraq and Syria is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Coots Force. I mean, and the way to think

about the Coots Force is like a like American Special Forces. And what they do is they go in and it's very subtle. It's covert and they train, advise, and equip local indigenous forces to fight better. And the Iranians are very good at this. This is the Coots Forces, in the Middle East, The Kuuz force is probably the best force for doing this.

But that is a reflection of Iran's conventional weakness in terms of power projection. So let's just talk for a second about, you know, I probably should have laid this out earlier. But, I mean, there are fronts on which Iran is actually fighting right now, right? I mean, they're Iranians inside Iraq and inside Syria. They're playing a support role, like you were just talking about training troops. They're actively fighting as well. Is that right? That's unclear to me. Okay.

I mean, we see, I mean, we know that, I mean, it's pretty clear that there are Iranian advisors and even unmanned, you know, drones. But these are like reconnaissance drones. They're small, sort of Iranian-produced reconnaissance aircraft. Again, I mean, the point is sort of make, sort of bolster the fighting strength of the local forces. Okay, so does this, is there any chance that this deal changes things? Does this change things for the Iranian military so that they would be able to bolster their military and become more a force in the region? Or do they even want that? Is the methods that they're using, do they work? Are they happy with the way that their military functions? And they project power in the region? Well, Iran, Iran lacks a lot of really key hardware to project power in the Persian Gulf. Iran relies heavily on anti-ship missiles. It's not clear if Beijing or Kremlin be willing to sell them, but these are the kinds of

weapons that Iran wants. But I think I have to put it in perspective. I mean, okay, so I think you're right that if Iran is able to buy hardware overseas or on the international market, the Iranian military will benefit. But we have to put it in perspective. So the Iranian military spends about upper limit, about 14. $15 billion a year on its military. Saudi Arabia has been $67 billion.

When you combine Saudi Arabia with the Gulf states, it bumps up to about $90 billion, that's six times as much. And so Iran is still going to be at a serious disadvantage compared to its main rivals in the most advanced hardware, which these countries are buying from the United States and from Europe. Yeah, they'll just be playing catch up. And there's another interesting thing I saw as I was researching this that the release of the embargo and the sanctions because of this deal are going to allow Iran to access assets that they had in foreign banks that have been frozen for years. And depending on where you read the information, you get different numbers, you know, about what that's going to be, somewhere around $100 billion.

even with that amount of money, it still would be hard for them. And that's just a one-time draw. They were crazy and withdrew it all. But even with that source of income coming in, it would still be hard for them to outspend their rivals in the region, such as Saudi Arabia. Right. I mean, and in a way, Saudi Arabia might spend too much.

I mean, there was a report. It was Anthony Cordsman in the Center for Strategic International Studies. And he had a note where, Saudi Arabia is buying so much advanced equipment, fighter jets, missile defense systems, command and control systems that Saudi Arabia's military is rather small. And they don't have enough soldiers to field all of this equipment. And so, you know, that kind of puts it in perspective a little bit. That's kind of fantastic.

Yeah, it's not the only country in the region that has that, problem. Qatar also is this is a similar story where they buy way more than they can use. Wow, that's a problem I think a lot of militaries would like to have. So, okay, so Iran, do you have any idea to give us some sense? I know there are some things that they are really good at, right? I mean, they're really good at building missiles. Yeah, I mean, for example. Right. So, I mean, Iran does have hundreds of ballistic missiles domestically produced the exact numbers, but it's several hundred. And I mean, this is one of the really controversial aspects of the P5 plus one deal. Israel in particular, you know, is terrified of Iranian, even conventionally

armed ballistic missiles, non-nuclear, just regular conventional explosives. The military utility of these is, I wouldn't overstate it, but politically these weapons are very, are, again, terrifying. I mean, the idea of these, not saying Iran would, but could target Israel with conventional ballistic missiles. And that would be, you know, almost like Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. We saw Iraq target Israel with scud missiles. and it caused relatively a few casualties, but again, it's a terrifying weapon to have these things coming down. It disrupts everyday life. And so this would, so, yeah, so Israel is, you know, being able to purchase missile components,

even precision, more precision guided systems for the missile, something where Iran lags behind. its rivals is one of the more, I can say, I'm trying to think of the right word to use. You're not problematic, but they're definitely controversial. Yeah, it's one of the reasons why Israel is so against the deal, I guess, or that's one of the reasons. The idea that Iran will, you know, be able to buy new equipment that will make their missiles more accurate, they're, of course, then also saying that Iran will be able to build a bomb, then they'll have the guidance system and they'll be able to pull it all together, right, and attack Israel. I mean, that's at least one of Netanyahu, the way Netanyahu paints the picture.

It's a reasonable concern. I mean, I think that, but I think we need to remember to think about ballistic missiles as less of a military, as having less military utility and more political influence. It provides a sense of leverage. And it's not just Israel, but also the Gulf states. Now, the trick is, is that this is a, happening in a vacuum. So Saudi Arabia in the Gulf states and the United States are spending a lot of money on deploying missile defense systems. Israel also, you know, has missile defense systems. And so I think that the concern is that you would have a, you could have a conventional arms race as opposed to a nuclear arms race, which is progress of a kind, I suppose.

You mean you're better off Everybody just gets more tanks rather than more nukes Yeah, okay, I guess fair enough Could Saudi Arabia legitimately fear Iran As an existential threat? I don't know the answer to that question The question is, in terms of a military threat You have to ask whether or not Iran could

invade Saudi Arabia And I don't know if Iran could it may be able to if the situation in Iraq deteriorated far worse than it already has Iran could in theory send conventional forces into Iraq and Kuwait

but whether or not they would be able to maintain the supply lines and the logistics an army has to eat, it has to have ammunition, has to have fuel and whether or not Iran has that logistical backbone to support something like that is I'm not sure. It would probably, it would take them at this point several years to build up that infrastructure now if they really wanted to project power in the region. Iran can, yeah, Iran cannot move conventional forces across the Persian Gulf without,

I mean, in a contested environment, I suppose as the military lingo, in the sense of anybody shooting back. They don't have enough, they don't have enough transport ships to do that. They have something, but they would need, so in Iraq, for instance, they would need a government that is amenable, most likely amenable to an Iranian intervention to allow that, similar to, say, the Kud's force operating in Iraq, you know, whether or not, whether, if a country didn't want the Iranians to be there, it would make it very difficult for Tehran to pull something like that off. And so, I mean, again, so I think the longer term, in a military conflict with Iran, I think the longer term threat would be, with a country like Saudi Arabia,

would be the threat to their shipping and a threat to their oil, which over time could present a real serious problem for the Saudi economy. It kind of brings up another thing, like as I'm thinking about the way that kind of war would be fought, another thing Iran is good at along with the commandos is drones, right? They have a fairly robust drone fleet, not in the same way that we think of in America with reapers and predators, these armed drones, but for surveillance purposes, they make extensive use. Well, I wouldn't overstate it. So, well, the way I would say it would be that, so Iran has used drones since the,

1980s. They have, Tehran has more than a dozen different types, mostly used for ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. There's one called the, there's a very, I'll say a variant of a drone called the swallow, which is actually a suicide drone. It's effectively a suicide bomb. Now, and, you know, they're, you know, they've crashed in Syria. So they're getting experience using them. To put it in perspective, the United States has 300 combat drones, reapers and predators. In Pakistan alone, the U.S. has killed, spent nearly 4,000 people since 9-11. So the United States has learned that even those best drones have a lot of problems, seeing things on the ground.

They're not very good spotters. The images are relatively grainy. It's hard to determine if you've struck a target. what damage you've caused. You really need people on the ground who can coordinate either between the drone or between a drone and a man-strike aircraft. Doing it from the air alone is really difficult. And so Iran has drones, but again, I don't want to overstate the threat from Iranian drones or something like that. In a more conventional war, they would have the same problems they have now, which, you know, coordinating the ground in the sky.

I see what you're saying. Right, and that's a big unknown, I think. And I mean, just getting information from the drone to the ground is a huge challenge on its own. And there's a lot of unknowns here regarding Iran's capabilities in this area. Right. And they don't have their own satellites, do they? Although I know they've been attempting to actually launch. Didn't they claim it a couple of years ago that they'd actually sent the monkey into space?

I'm pretty sure they did. Iran has satellites, yeah. They did claim two years ago, Jason, that they sent a monkey into space. And it was the second time. They said they had done so. I wonder if the monkey had such a good time the first time. What kind of, do we have any idea what kind of weapons Iran would want to buy or that Russia would be willing to sell to them? Or China would be willing to sell to them?

With Russia, the big sort of delayed purchaser, our S-300. anti-aircraft missiles. It's an export variant from Russia, but some of the defense analysts say they're some of the best air defense missiles in the world. I mean, and that's something Iran can't produce the best stuff domestically there. So they have to import it. And this is principally to deter an air attack from the United States or Israel. So again, again defensive. The Gulf states and Israel, they're not just worried about direct attack. There's, you know, when we talked earlier about the training of insurgent groups and helping those insurgent groups inside of other countries carry out the Iranian agenda. I think one way of putting it is that Iran practices what you call asymmetric warfare.

So, I mean, the idea is that you use if your opponent has, think of a conventional military, it's like an army and navy and an air force. if you're outgunned by your enemy, then an asymmetric strategy uses your enemy's strength against it and tries to find weaknesses, which you can exploit either through insurgency, you know, insurgency is an example of asymmetric warfare, swarming small boats in the Persian Gulf toward larger big conventional warships is an asymmetric strategy.

So I think the way to looking at the threat from Iran to its rise, is to look at ways in which it can practice that sort of asymmetric warfare. So supporting Shia activist groups in Bahrain, for instance, were the Bahraini government toppled, then Iran could move conventional forces into Bahrain. But again, it has to rely on the asymmetric stuff before it can rely on its conventional forces. It does sound that, you know, there's an awful lot of alarmism out there as much as there are real threats. Or, again, you know, maybe it's just that we think of these things as World War II movies with lots of tanks sweeping across the desert. And it's just, I mean, that's really not the threat.

I mean, that's... Well, I think you want to look at something like, like, has been. Hesbalah, right? That's more in line with the way the Iranian military's asymmetric warfare works. Yeah. Hensbala is very interesting because it blends sort of a combination. And so it's able to use really sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles, which are, you know, most likely come from Iran, present an asymmetric threat to conventional Israeli forces, large numbers of tanks, for instance. So, but again, I have to think about this. And, you know, instead of World War II, in the modern era, we often see militaries finding themselves in circumstances which they didn't anticipate or didn't prepare for. The Iranian conventional army, you know, is designed to fight a layered sort of defense

in depth of the Iranian homeland. If Iran was, that conventional army was found itself in. in an environment which is very different from that, we may see weaknesses that we're not aware of. Weaknesses in logistics, the backbone, the supply, their officer corps. How is the military led? How are Iranian officers promoted? Does that have an effect on the fighting strength of Iranian units?

So there's a lot of unanswered questions. And again, we wouldn't see unless hopefully not there was a conflict. Yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. It does show you, though. I mean, Hezbollah, that's an example of the way things are being fought now. They're very effective. I mean, at least they were against Israel. What was that about five years ago or so? 2006. Wow. I'm dating myself, so nine years ago, but still. Right. I mean, and that was a situation. You have a small number of very professional insurgents in a way. But they're, you know, supplied with really sophisticated guided weapons.

And so when Israel came across the border with tank columns, they found themselves, you know, actually it's taking pretty serious losses. And you can't necessarily fight a dispersed enemy like that with a conventional force. Hezbollah's strength is amplified by these weapons, and their weaknesses are reduced by being able to disperse their forces. Like every encounter you ever read about, it's the, the light mobile force, right, that can scatter into the wind, you know, gives the centralized and heavy force a really hard time. And note that Iran is not the only country in the region

that is practicing this form of warfare or this form of power projection. So if Iran's conventional forces were to, say, hypothetically, in theory, move into Iraq, they would find themselves fighting an enemy that fights a very different kind of style of war than they're accustomed to. Right, gotcha. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, in a way, I mean, there's a, I mean, ISIS at one point was, you might have started as somewhat of a proxy force and may have gotten a bit out of hand. Just a touch out of hand.

ISIS practices, yeah, let's say ISIS practices a kind of warfare that they're very unpredictable. They have some pretty heavy duty hardware. ISIS is a whole other beast, right? It's a whole other different kind of thing. All right. Well, so, all right, well, back on track with Iran, I would just say. The long and the short of the Iran story seems to be that it's just not a really simple equation. It's not a matter of turning the money taps back on, and all of a sudden they become a

massive power with thousands and thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of migs that'll fly across the skies and conquer the Middle East, right? Right, there's this fear right now that that's exactly what's going to happen, that this Iranian nuclear deal has unleashed something horrifying in the Middle East, and that's just not, that's overblown, and doesn't look at what's actually going on in the region, and what the people, the different powers in the region want. Okay, well, thank you very much both of you for joining me for this. I think it's really interesting topic,

and it sounds like there's definitely a lot of misinformation. Absolutely. Thank you, Jason. Next time on War College. Europe, they're viewing this influx, something like a quarter of a million people came across by sea so far as an invasion.