Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Has Sea-Skimming Flying Boats
Iran has fielded a variety of unusual weapons over the years: F-14 Tomcat fighters hotwired to fire Russian missiles, homemade mini-submarines, and remanufactured Cold War jets. In 2006, Iranian television showcased a peculiar sea-skimming flying boat, and four years later Tehran triumphantly announced it had three squadrons of them serving in the Iranian... Read more
Iran Is Building Air Defenses Against Stealth Aircraft
Read parts one and two. How did the Iranians manage to develop a host of entirely new radar designs and several new surface-to-air missile systems and even produce a match for the Russian-made S-300 — all within less than 10 years? Perhaps more importantly, are systems such as Talash-3... Read more
Building the Ayatollah’s Submarines
The Iranian military has long planned for a defensive naval war in the Persian Gulf, in which it would leverage its large fleet of fast attack boats toting anti-ship missiles to launch swarming hit-and-run attacks on adversaries in along Persian Gulf, with the ultimate goal of shutting down passage through the... Read more
Iran Is Building Air Defenses Against Stealth Aircraft
Read part one. The repeated use of same or similar designations for different radar and missile systems has created the impression that Iranian air-defense development is a chaotic mess. In fact, projects are proceeding along four main lines. The overhaul and upgrade of MIM-23B I-HAWK, S-200/SA-5, SA-6, SA-11 and... Read more
Iran Is Too Much of a Mess to Acquire Russian Weaponry
This story originally appeared on Sept. 12, 2016. News reports claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in the process of deploying Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missiles and is either negotiating for, or has already placed an order for, 300 T-90 main battle tanks and at least 30 Sukhoi... Read more
All the Times the Iranian Navy Got Its Ass Kicked
This story originally appeared on Feb. 9, 2014. In February 2014, the Iranian navy announced it was sending two warships toward the U.S. East Coast. “This move has a message,” Adm. Afshin Rezayee Haddad said, adding that the deployment is “Iran’s response to Washington’s beefed up naval presence in... Read more
Iran Is Building Air Defenses Against Stealth Aircraft
In early August 2017, the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute released a report on the importance of stealth capabilities for current and future U.S. Air Force aircraft. “Stealth, or aircraft signature reduction, is a potent and viable military capability in modern combat and will remain so well into the... Read more
Iraq’s Shia Militia Problem Always Felt a Lot Like 2007
In August 2014, Islamic State militants seemed poised to seize Amerli, a Shia Turkmen town in northern Iraq. Had they done so, there’s little question the result would have been mass slaughter—just like happened when the Islamists captured the Kurdish Yezidi town of Sinjar. A force of Shia Arab... Read more
Before the Nuclear Deal, America and Iran Flirted With War
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, is arguably the most significant foreign policy achievement of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration. For all its faults, the deal demonstrated that, under certain conditions, an intensely hostile regime such as the Islamic Republic... Read more
I Got My Hands on a Bootleg of Iran’s Weird Drone Movie
This story originally appeared on Sept. 17, 2014. Mohajer is a 1990 movie about the final days of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War and the early days of killer drones. It’s a strange and amazing film that fetishizes unmanned aerial vehicles and kills off—I mean, martyrs—pretty much every one of... Read more

Matthew Gault

Contributing Editor