Iran's Military Capability: The Structure and Strength of Forces.

• Author: Farhad, Rezaei
• Position: ARITICLE

Theoretical Framework

The realist theory of international relations defines the concept of 'power' in one connotation: military power. Traditionally, realism places a high value on states' reliance primarily on military force for maintaining their independence. It was based on this definition that the states with strong military power were labelled "Great Powers;" according to realism, these states are playing the game of international politics. Thucydides (460s-390s BCE), the intellectual forefather of realism, claimed that "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." (1) Similarly, John Mearsheimer, the prominent contemporary realist scholar notes, "Power is the currency of great power politics, and states compete for it among themselves. What money is to economics, power is to international relations." (2) Realists view power largely in military terms. Mearsheimer's emphasis on military force is relatively explicit: "In international politics... a state's effective power is ultimately a function of its military forces... The balance of power is largely synonymous with the balance of military power. I define power largely in military terms because offensive realism emphasizes that force is the ultima ratio of international politics." (3) Other realists refer to military capability as a "central force to international politics," "a capacity to wage war," and "the ultimate form of power." Even those who oppose this definition and criticize the emphasis on military power agree that military power dominates other forms of power. (4)

Kenneth Waltz, theorist and founding father of neo-realism, argues that international system is anarchic in the sense that no single player governs the system. Thus, the pursuit of power is necessary to preserve a state's self-security. According to Waltz, national actors do not trust each other and strive to make themselves strong and independent from all external constraints. Thus, maximizing military power is considered to be a "rational response" to the existential predicaments of an anarchic system. According to Waltz, "strategic interdependence and the absence of morality" in the anarchic system mean that each player, if it desires to be effective, must maximize its military power. (5)

Although some scholars argue that military power has a restricted utility and is not the ultimate measuring rod today as it was as in the 19th and 20th centuries, the size of the military budgets of the great powers indicates that military capability is still considered the ultimate form of power in world politics. As the Harvard scholar Joseph Nye notes, economic power "simply is not amenable to military force. It is increasingly important in this century, but it would be a mistake to write off the role of military power" According to Nye, it is true that there are situations in which military power is difficult to use, but it remains an essential component of power in world politics. As Nye metaphorically puts it, "military power provides a degree of security that is to order as oxygen is to breathing: little noticed until it becomes scarce, at which point its absence dominates all else." (6)

Iran, like any other player in the anarchical international system, strives to maximize its military power in order to preserve its survival. However, since the country has been under the arms embargo since 1979, it suffers from military disadvantages. To offset the weakness of Iran's military arsenal, the realists in its regime have embarked on different methods, including developing asymmetrical defense capability and relying on proxies dubbed "Forward Defense" to preserve its status as a major military player in the Middle East.

Iran's Military Doctrine

Iran's military capabilities reflect the military doctrine of the Islamic Republic, which has evolved since the 1979 Revolution. As a rule, this military doctrine derives from theory, historical experience, ideology, and practice. Doctrine generates concepts and principles which form the strategies guiding the organization and the training of Iran's military forces to achieve national security objectives. In 1992, these principles were codified in the regulation of the Iranian Armed Forces, a document which, with some changes, still applies today. (7)

The Iranian military doctrine has two dimensions: ideological-political and military-technical. The ideological-political encompasses a belief in the principle of velayt al faqih as an ultimate spiritual-military guide, i.e. the notion of the Islamic Republic as a protector of Islam, notably the mustazafeen (the oppressed), and a sense of the duty to export the Islamist revolution. The military-technical part guides the formation of a military force and strategies which fulfill these political goals, and well as the more traditional tasks of safeguarding national independence and territorial integrity.

Impoverished by revolutionary upheaval and the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamic Republic was unable to create a strong conventional military force to project an offensive capability. As a result, the doctrine called for a radical deterrence posture. In other words, the aim was to increase an adversary's cost of attack rather than reducing its own risk through a conventional buildup. To maximize its deterrence capability, Iran has relied on a three-layered asymmetrical approach: the implicit threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), irregular naval warfare, and terror attacks on opponents in the region and beyond. Exporting the revolution and projecting Iranian influence abroad was the only offensive component of the doctrine, to be achieved through proxies.

These doctrinal considerations generated a rather unique, bifurcated military structure which boasts a regular military, the Artesh, and an irregular military/militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Known in Persian as Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami, the Revolutionary Guard is tasked with domestic and external defense. While the Basij militia helps to enforce domestic order, the Quds Force (QF), is the foreign operation branch of the Revolutionary Guard, occasionally helped by the Artesh and also in charge of several proxy forces established in neighboring countries. The division of labor among the three sections is not clear-cut since some offensive and deterrence functions are shared and some are rotated in an ad hoc manner.

Iran's Military Structure and Strength

In the following sections, we will review Iran's budget and its military assets one by one, employing a quantitative approach to gather both primary and secondary data and information with the objective of determining Iran's military strength.

Iran's Defense Budget and Allocations

Iran's proposed defense budget for fiscal year (FY) 2018-2019 (starting from March 2018) is $10.2 billion, approximately $2 billion less than the country's defense budget in FY 2016-2017.The numbers are based on eachdollar equivalent to 40,000 Iranian Rirls. (For more info about Iren's Military expenditure see, Geaph 1). OF this amount, $2.27 billion is allocated to Artesh, $6.684 bilion to the Revolutionary Guards, $442.724 million to the Defense Ministry, $424.382 million to the Armed Forces General Staff (AFGS) and $295.120 million to the Basij force. (8)

Sincethe 1979 Revolution, a significant portion of Iran's military investments has been in the Revolutionary Guards asymmetric-warfare capabilities, the ballistic-missile project, and anasymmetrical hybrid naval approach subsumed under the so-called Anti-Access/Anti-Denial(A2/AD) systems to address external threats, such as limiting U.S. power-projection and naval operations in the Persian Gulf and creating disruption in critical maritime chokepoints. According to various sources, the Revolutionary Guard also has considerable independent income from its economic holdings in Iran and foreign ventures in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. (9)

Yet, as assessed by military experts, by 2016 Iran's military strength was "very weak." Iran spent only $550 million on weapons procurement in 2015. According to Iranian military officials, a "refresh" of the country's military could cost approximately $40 billion. To understand how poor the 2018-2019 proposed defense budget is, it is useful to compare Iran's weapons procurement with its regional rivals equipped with a growing level of sophistication in weapons technology. For example, the annual spending of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states on their military purchases is $98.5 billion, compared to Iran's $10.2 billion. According to the data provided by the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS), in the period of 2004 to 2011, the GCC countries purchased $38.5 billion worth of new weapons, roughly 35 times more than the Islamic Republic's of $1.1 billion for the same period. The data released by independent sources researching arms control and disarmament also shows that the GCC countries have a massive lead over the Islamic Republic in their military purchase. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), "the GCC countries led Iran by approximately 7:1 from 1997 to 2007, almost 10:1 during 2004-2008, nearly 33:1 from 2009 to 2013 and about 27.5:1 between 2007 and 2014." (10)

In addition to significantly outspending Iran for decades, the GCC states have access to modern U.S. and EU military technology. According to the SIPRI, the military outlay of Saudi Arabia was twice larger than Iran's military expenditures, and the military outlays of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was approximately seven times as large as of the Islamic Republic. This gap has widened even further from 2009 to 2014 when the UAE and Saudi Arabia increased their imports of weapons and military technology to 16 and 18 times larger than Iran respectively. (11)

Between October 2010 and October 2014, Saudis ordered $90.435 billion worth of military hardware from the United...