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An introduction to a 153 page deep analysis by the American Enterprise Institute. I'm about a third of the way through reading the analysis (download the PDF at the bottom) and so far it's looking good.
http://www.aei.org/spotlight/the-future-of-irans-security-policy/
When the Syrian opposition stronghold of Aleppo fell in late 2016, Iran was the central player in a coalition that dropped barrel bombs on marketplaces, targeted aid workers, besieged the city, and killed more than 31,000 civilians. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s (IRI) major role in the battle, which at one point supported 25,000 affiliated troops and militias on the ground, was more significant than even the Syrian Army presence. But how and why is Iran willing and able to expend vast resources in Syria when opposition forces do not directly threaten the Iranian homeland? If Washington had better understood Tehran’s capacity for expeditionary warfare and degree of commitment to Damascus sooner, it would have gained the tools to craft much wiser policy in the conflict.
Syria is just one example in which greater insight into Iran’s security decision-making—how Tehran approaches the use of force, deterrence, proportionality, and escalation calculus, as well as how the leadership thinks about strategy, doctrine, and military capabilities—will determine successful US policy in the Middle East. Policymakers unfortunately face an endemic shortage of academic work on the nature of IRI’s security decision-making, especially in comparison to similar efforts on competitors such as China and Russia. Insight into these topics is essential to answer questions about Iranian behavior throughout the region.
With that in mind, the need for better analysis of Iranian hard power—both conventional and unconventional—is arguably more important today than ever before in light of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and growing Iranian influence across the region. An Islamic Republic freed from onerous sanctions pours even more resources into its operations in the Levant and elsewhere. If the United States hopes to roll back Iranian influence around the world, knowledge of Iran’s security decision-making calculus would be essential to contain escalation, blunt Iran’s offensive actions, and decisively achieve US objectives. Simply put, the US needs a better understanding of how Iran fights and prepares for war.
This monograph attempts to answer those questions. Rather than supplying definitive formulas or “playbooks” for Iranian behavior, which would be impossible from a US standpoint, this work provides a series of analytic frameworks and tools for policymakers to appropriately interpret the IRI’s decision-making. It draws on historical case studies since the 1979 Islamic Revolution (focusing on the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, the US-Iran Tanker conflicts, the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, and the ongoing Syrian civil war), a post-JCPOA failure crisis simulation exercise, extensive analysis of senior Iranian leadership statements and writings, military exercise observation, and economic assessments. Particular attention is paid to areas that will be of most interest to US military and security officials.
This monograph begins with an exploration of Iran’s strategic culture. For the purposes of this monograph, the concept of strategic culture can best be described as the worldview and decision-making patterns of a state’s political and military leadership. Understanding how historical legacies, geographical realities, religious and ideological tenets, and national interests shape the Islamic Republic’s threat perceptions illuminates the drivers of the IRI’s security behavior.
Iran’s strategic culture is inextricably tied to how the Islamic Republic sees the role of military force in its strategic calculus. This monograph examines a core paradox in Iran’s strategic behavior that tends to confound policymakers across the political spectrum. Iran’s weak traditional armed forces and revolutionary ideologies make its conventional doctrines overwhelmingly defensive. These drivers also push Iran to pursue its more aggressive, and ultimately revisionist, foreign policies through unconventional means such as proxy forces and asymmetric fighting doctrines.
However, Iran’s military capabilities and perceptions of major threats appear to be on the precipice of a major shift. In thinking through a post-JCPOA world—with loosened arms embargoes and realigned political realities—the United States needs to consider how and why Iran would use military force. This will be a major theme of this monograph.
Section II attempts to answer some essential questions about how the Islamic Republic views the nature of war. We will address why Iran decides to use military force, how it understands deterrence against the US, why it decides to escalate or de-escalate a conflict, how Iran understands retaliation and reciprocity, and in what context it will attempt to end a conflict. The answers to these questions are partly based on the findings drawn from an expert-level crisis simulation of a confrontation between the United States and Iran and from case studies of major Iranian military actions since the Iran-Iraq War.
Section III attempts to build an analytic framework for examining Iran’s war-fighting concepts. It explores doctrine at the strategic level—that is, how a state’s military power is designed and employed to achieve its security objectives, rather than operational or tactical levels of conflict. It will lay out how formal and informal structures in Iran create strategy and doctrine, which institutions or individuals matter in shaping doctrinal ideas, and which historical and ideological factors drive Iran’s thinking about military power. This model conceptualizes the nature of Iran’s defensive and offensive doctrines and aims to explain how and why Iranian strategy and force posture may evolve as restrictions on resources and how and why conventional weapons acquisition relax under the JCPOA. Understanding how the Iranian leadership looks at military power and strategy is crucial for designing better US force posture in the region, improving security cooperation with our allies, and communicating more effective responses to Tehran’s behavior in the Middle East and globally.
Section IV of this monograph discusses if and how Iran will pursue structural changes for its military force after the nuclear deal. If Iran is going to place a much greater emphasis on conventional offensive weapons than it has in the past, then this will likely require greater resources or a different allocation of resources than Iran traditionally allocates its military. Since unconventional forces dominate Tehran’s military historically, its industrial base is not optimized for constructing, equipping, and deploying a large conventional force. The JCPOA does provide new financial means and, eventually, access to additional military weapons and technology that may allow Iran to undergo a real military transformation. This section also examines how Iran makes decisions about military procurement and production. It addresses ways to understand Iranian defense spending, Iran’s current and future military budget trends, the strengths and weaknesses of Iran’s military industrial base, Tehran’s likely paths to modernize its military, and most importantly, the drivers of Iran’s decision-making on weapons and acquisitions. A technical understanding, for example, of the types of platforms Iran procures from foreign powers versus the systems Tehran attempts to build at home will offer the Western observer insight into the regime’s long-range thinking and capacities.
The US spent the past four decades often befuddled by Iran’s security policies. As a result, Tehran operates with relative freedom and impunity across the region. But there are no “mad mullahs” in Tehran. The Iranian leadership can be considered “logical” if its decision-making patterns and worldview are well understood (as much as we oppose that worldview). Western policymakers’ failure to understand this is the primary source of poor US strategy in the region since 1979. Hopefully, this monograph will lift the shroud on Iranian strategic thinking and guide better paths to a more stable Middle East.
Download the PDF
http://www.aei.org/spotlight/the-future-of-irans-security-policy/
When the Syrian opposition stronghold of Aleppo fell in late 2016, Iran was the central player in a coalition that dropped barrel bombs on marketplaces, targeted aid workers, besieged the city, and killed more than 31,000 civilians. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s (IRI) major role in the battle, which at one point supported 25,000 affiliated troops and militias on the ground, was more significant than even the Syrian Army presence. But how and why is Iran willing and able to expend vast resources in Syria when opposition forces do not directly threaten the Iranian homeland? If Washington had better understood Tehran’s capacity for expeditionary warfare and degree of commitment to Damascus sooner, it would have gained the tools to craft much wiser policy in the conflict.
Syria is just one example in which greater insight into Iran’s security decision-making—how Tehran approaches the use of force, deterrence, proportionality, and escalation calculus, as well as how the leadership thinks about strategy, doctrine, and military capabilities—will determine successful US policy in the Middle East. Policymakers unfortunately face an endemic shortage of academic work on the nature of IRI’s security decision-making, especially in comparison to similar efforts on competitors such as China and Russia. Insight into these topics is essential to answer questions about Iranian behavior throughout the region.
With that in mind, the need for better analysis of Iranian hard power—both conventional and unconventional—is arguably more important today than ever before in light of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and growing Iranian influence across the region. An Islamic Republic freed from onerous sanctions pours even more resources into its operations in the Levant and elsewhere. If the United States hopes to roll back Iranian influence around the world, knowledge of Iran’s security decision-making calculus would be essential to contain escalation, blunt Iran’s offensive actions, and decisively achieve US objectives. Simply put, the US needs a better understanding of how Iran fights and prepares for war.
This monograph attempts to answer those questions. Rather than supplying definitive formulas or “playbooks” for Iranian behavior, which would be impossible from a US standpoint, this work provides a series of analytic frameworks and tools for policymakers to appropriately interpret the IRI’s decision-making. It draws on historical case studies since the 1979 Islamic Revolution (focusing on the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, the US-Iran Tanker conflicts, the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, and the ongoing Syrian civil war), a post-JCPOA failure crisis simulation exercise, extensive analysis of senior Iranian leadership statements and writings, military exercise observation, and economic assessments. Particular attention is paid to areas that will be of most interest to US military and security officials.
This monograph begins with an exploration of Iran’s strategic culture. For the purposes of this monograph, the concept of strategic culture can best be described as the worldview and decision-making patterns of a state’s political and military leadership. Understanding how historical legacies, geographical realities, religious and ideological tenets, and national interests shape the Islamic Republic’s threat perceptions illuminates the drivers of the IRI’s security behavior.
Iran’s strategic culture is inextricably tied to how the Islamic Republic sees the role of military force in its strategic calculus. This monograph examines a core paradox in Iran’s strategic behavior that tends to confound policymakers across the political spectrum. Iran’s weak traditional armed forces and revolutionary ideologies make its conventional doctrines overwhelmingly defensive. These drivers also push Iran to pursue its more aggressive, and ultimately revisionist, foreign policies through unconventional means such as proxy forces and asymmetric fighting doctrines.
However, Iran’s military capabilities and perceptions of major threats appear to be on the precipice of a major shift. In thinking through a post-JCPOA world—with loosened arms embargoes and realigned political realities—the United States needs to consider how and why Iran would use military force. This will be a major theme of this monograph.
Section II attempts to answer some essential questions about how the Islamic Republic views the nature of war. We will address why Iran decides to use military force, how it understands deterrence against the US, why it decides to escalate or de-escalate a conflict, how Iran understands retaliation and reciprocity, and in what context it will attempt to end a conflict. The answers to these questions are partly based on the findings drawn from an expert-level crisis simulation of a confrontation between the United States and Iran and from case studies of major Iranian military actions since the Iran-Iraq War.
Section III attempts to build an analytic framework for examining Iran’s war-fighting concepts. It explores doctrine at the strategic level—that is, how a state’s military power is designed and employed to achieve its security objectives, rather than operational or tactical levels of conflict. It will lay out how formal and informal structures in Iran create strategy and doctrine, which institutions or individuals matter in shaping doctrinal ideas, and which historical and ideological factors drive Iran’s thinking about military power. This model conceptualizes the nature of Iran’s defensive and offensive doctrines and aims to explain how and why Iranian strategy and force posture may evolve as restrictions on resources and how and why conventional weapons acquisition relax under the JCPOA. Understanding how the Iranian leadership looks at military power and strategy is crucial for designing better US force posture in the region, improving security cooperation with our allies, and communicating more effective responses to Tehran’s behavior in the Middle East and globally.
Section IV of this monograph discusses if and how Iran will pursue structural changes for its military force after the nuclear deal. If Iran is going to place a much greater emphasis on conventional offensive weapons than it has in the past, then this will likely require greater resources or a different allocation of resources than Iran traditionally allocates its military. Since unconventional forces dominate Tehran’s military historically, its industrial base is not optimized for constructing, equipping, and deploying a large conventional force. The JCPOA does provide new financial means and, eventually, access to additional military weapons and technology that may allow Iran to undergo a real military transformation. This section also examines how Iran makes decisions about military procurement and production. It addresses ways to understand Iranian defense spending, Iran’s current and future military budget trends, the strengths and weaknesses of Iran’s military industrial base, Tehran’s likely paths to modernize its military, and most importantly, the drivers of Iran’s decision-making on weapons and acquisitions. A technical understanding, for example, of the types of platforms Iran procures from foreign powers versus the systems Tehran attempts to build at home will offer the Western observer insight into the regime’s long-range thinking and capacities.
The US spent the past four decades often befuddled by Iran’s security policies. As a result, Tehran operates with relative freedom and impunity across the region. But there are no “mad mullahs” in Tehran. The Iranian leadership can be considered “logical” if its decision-making patterns and worldview are well understood (as much as we oppose that worldview). Western policymakers’ failure to understand this is the primary source of poor US strategy in the region since 1979. Hopefully, this monograph will lift the shroud on Iranian strategic thinking and guide better paths to a more stable Middle East.
Download the PDF
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