Essentially, it is as you said in your first post: they are as their name suggests. In the beginning of the revolution the akhoonds (mullahs) couldn't trust the military,
I think you hit the nail in the head. Soon after the revolution, there was a huge purge in the military, that resulted in the expulsion of thousands of experienced officers from army and especially air force. Despite that their performance in the Iraq-Iran war was very good.
Having both army and IRGC has advantages and disadvantages, good part is that IRGC has a more forward thinking leadership when it comes to equipment and tactics and recruits young high ranking commanders, unfortunately army refuses to do so and tends to stick to its old generals.
That is just propaganda. If you want an example of how both performed you need to only look at the Iran-Iraq war. While the regular forces executed robust military tactics that included armored assaults, deep interdiction air strikes into Iraq, tactical retreats and counter-offensives; The IRGC employed WW2 tactics, namely human wave attacks against the backdrop of a modern battlefield. A lot of these ancient attacks resulted in 10,000+ casulties, people were slaughtered and little was achieved.
Wrong, IRGC is incorporating modern military strategies and tactics, they go after modern weapons and are much quicker to give them to their units than the army and they build most of their own stuff.
That's where the problem lies. Giving them modern weapons when they do not know how to use them. Look at how much money was wasted destroying the mock AC. It was all a show just for cameras. Modern warfare requires commanders to be scholars in military strategy, I do not think it's possible for a political military wing to adapt to those simply because they do not have the infrastruction, military tradion and history to do so. It does not matter how good a person's intentions are, when you use a guy in wheelchair to play football, he will lose.
Every country needs at least 2 independent major ground forces to keep each other in check and prevents coups.
Every country in the region has this, beyond the region as well.
1 example of the region is the regular army and the republican guard in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen etc. In the US it's the army and the marines.
Yes, also the SANG in KSA. I don't think Syria has any such faction since all i hear about is their army, but i won't be surprised if they do. But Turkey does not have any such faction, neither does Pakistan. We only have one army. We do have paramilitary forces but they are just as their name suggests, used to patrol borders mostly rather than a political force.
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