by Alexander Kharchenko

Since we are talking about the Iranian military-industrial complex, I will share my observations. For 5 years in Syria, I worked side by side with the Iranians and saw their Wunderwaffe on the battlefield.

At first it seemed strange to me that the Iranians make low-quality copies of AKs, crooked gun barrels and terrible tank shells from which the crew is dying. At the same time, they had good thermal imagers, ATGMs, and their attack UAVs chopped up ISIS in thin slices in the long ago 2017. Let’s figure out this paradox.

It is useless to compare the Russian military-industrial complex with the Iranian one. We have different philosophies. We wanted to fight head on with NATO, while the Iranians were preparing Afghanistan for the Americans to the tenth degree. The Persians* realize that in open combat against the NATO armada they have no chance. Therefore, their military strategy requires those types of weapons that the Russian army has not paid attention to for decades.

Based on the Afghan experience, the Persians realized that the defeat of the armed forces did not at all mean defeat in the war. The Iranians learned to conduct professional guerrilla warfare. In Syria, Yemen and Iraq, they honed their skills in building “territorial defense”. Highly motivated and poorly trained natives of one village, under the guidance of an Iranian mentor, became a formidable force capable of resisting both ISIS and Hadi forces.

The Iranians were preparing to burn American convoys from ambush, so they produced tens of thousands of large-caliber sniper rifles, ATGMs and thermal imagers. In addition, they mastered the production of cheap but effective UAVs for strikes against American bases. Reconnaissance of American positions requires thousands of UAVs with good cameras, and they were able to arrange their production because it was critical to their safety. At that time, we were building rockets capable of circumnavigating the globe.

While we were modernizing the nuclear triad, the Persians, with the help of a powerful ideology and competent actions of the special services, turned their nation into a weapon of a new kind. You can still defeat an army, but you can never defeat a whole nation. And from the Persians, we can learn not only the experience of building UAVs.

(c) Alexander Kharchenko

@OpenUkraine 🇮🇷 Leading pro-Russian Ukrainian channel on Iranian military industrial complex and warfare:

*Most people are not aware that Persians make up only ~55% of Iran’s population and when one wants to show respect one calls all of them “Persians” – ZradaXXII.