Hossein Dadvand is a greying commander who runs an important combat college north of Tehran. He is tasked with training the thousands of Iranian soldiers who pass through his barracks gates on how to fight — and win — on the battlefield.
In the lead-up to the weeks-long war with Israel and the US, Dadvand was among those within Iran’s military assiduously mining the war in Ukraine for strategic lessons. These ranged, Dadvand wrote in an article, from the resilience of Ukrainian defence production to the use of 3D printers to mass-produce cheap drones.
His recommendations were published in a prestigious Iranian defence publication two years ago. Iran, he appealed to his superiors, must invest in drones, use nimbler and more mobile combat units, and update how it trains and fights. It should also look towards applying AI in its weaponry, he suggested.
The FT reviewed more than 300 such articles published over the past five years in a dozen Iranian defence publications. They provide a unique window into the secretive Iranian establishment, including into what is being discussed internally, how tactics are evolving and changing, and what technologies are being prioritised.
The articles reveal Iran has closely studied Ukraine for lessons, especially about drones, has been focused on modernising its cyberwarfare assets, and is worried about its forces’ forward planning. They show Tehran has closely watched Russian performance as well as how Ukraine has adapted to fighting a much more powerful opponent.
While nothing in the research Dadvand produced was in itself surprising, it may have provided an early clue as to the direction of travel within Iran. Last year, he gave a rare interview at a newly opened shooting range. He revealed Tehran had modernised the textbooks and training techniques to reflect experiences from Ukraine.
“The Russia-Ukraine war was one of the cases that we examined carefully,” Dadvand said. “One of the most important points in that war was the widespread use of small drones and artificial intelligence. We are witnessing the entry of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum, and nano into the military arena.”
All the articles the FT reviewed were published in publicly accessible journals affiliated to the most important staff colleges and finishing schools of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the regular Iranian Armed Forces. Their authors include senior commanders, ambitious officers and academics tasked with analysing the strategic challenges that Iran faces.
They provide tantalising glimpses into how the Iranian military thinks and learns lessons that it can apply in future conflicts.
“They are for military learning,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran at Sciences Po in Paris. “They are also for floating ideas to see if there is a reaction. Those ideas will sometimes be taken up and you will see adaptations and shifts.”
But the most revealing clues they can offer are about how senior Iranian commanders were assessing and writing about their nation’s vulnerabilities in the years building up to the conflict with Israel and the US.
These include a co-authored article in Strategic Defence Studies by Kioumars Heydari and Abdolali Pourshasb — two influential senior commanders who have both previously run the Iranian Army — in which they worried about limited forward planning against “emerging threats”.
They wrote in 2023 that Iran must quickly recruit specialists, reform its military exercises, and plan its weapons procurement around advanced technologies, such as drones, lasers and space-based platforms. They too cited the conflict in Ukraine as having been a source of “new threats”.
“I think one of the reasons they are writing about the war in Ukraine is partially because they are getting data from that war,” said Grajewski, adding that writing about foreign conflicts gave more latitude for introspection. “They want to have the students be aware of operations there and how the Russians are operating,” she added.
While Iranian military research journals are less detailed than their equivalents in Russia, Grajewski said journals offered a controlled way for various branches to compete for resources and attention.
Aziz Nasirzadeh, a former air force chief who served as minister of defence who was killed in an air strike on February 28, co-authored a piece on the Iran-Iraq war which concluded with an urgent appeal for Tehran to rebuild its neglected fighter fleet by purchasing Su-35s from Russia. It was published in Defence Future Studies, a journal associated with the main staff college of the Iranian Army.
Buying expensive Su-35s from Russia appeared to have been a source of contention between different branches of the Iranian military. Tehran confirmed it would move forward with acquiring the Su-35s, which are yet to be delivered, shortly after Nasirzadeh was appointed as defence minister. His article preceded that appointment by several months.
In the article, Nasirzadeh also recommended that Iran equip its air forces with suicide drones and integrate AI into its target-selection procedures. But he also appealed to “rebuild worn-out sections” of air force bases.
Nasirzadeh had also co-authored a study claiming the US Air Force was increasingly ineffective because of age and failed modernisation programmes.
Journals were one of the few ways to glean information on how Iran might behave in certain contingencies, said Afshon Ostovar, an expert on the Iranian military.
Papers seen by the FT sketched in broad terms how commanders might best deal with situations such as boarding ships in the Strait of Hormuz or fending off an amphibious invasion. They concluded a confrontational approach was preferable in the first, while the second pointed to minelaying in coastal waters as a deterrence mechanism.
“They are most interesting when they are talking about their own practices, operations and procedures,” said Ostovar, adding that by tracing the editorial lines of important journals it was possible to build a reasonably reliable picture about what Iran was prioritising.
“You can get a blurry vision for how they are changing and adapting,” Ostovar said. “They are often revealing in what they are paying attention to.”
Many articles are on drone technologies, tactics and communications, as well as surveys assessing the efficiency of Iranian air-defence batteries. There is a notable focus on strengthening cyberwarfare capabilities, including by integrating AI into decision-making and attacks.
Analysts said officers, commanders and intelligence officials sometimes authored papers under pseudonyms. They noted articles written by senior figures needed to be taken much more seriously than those written by students or academics.
Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said scientific and technical research tended to be more rigorous than strategic analyses. Those articles on foreign policy were often so methodologically poor that he considered their conclusions to be “garbage”.
Nadimi said US intelligence would nevertheless have poured over Iranian publications seeking nuggets of information. He added Tehran had taken steps to prevent sensitive information seeping out by issuing directives restricting officers and engineers working on defence projects from publishing too much about them.
But even poorly researched papers could be valuable for understanding the mindset of Iranian officers. Many depicted Washington as weakened and saw opportunities for Iran to remake the Middle East. Azerbaijan, which has close ties with Israel, is also often assessed as a security concern for Iran.
“They are really very ideological in the way they understand the universe,” Ostovar said.
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Michael Connell, a former US intelligence officer and Iran expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, said he found articles featuring surveys of experts and serving soldiers on less sensitive matters to be the most valuable.
One paper the FT reviewed said it was important to prevent soldiers from being tempted to join “deviant sects”. Another discovered chronic problems within military hospitals which were vulnerable to crises because of an over-reliance on private-sector suppliers and which had been neglecting their “core functions” to prioritise revenue-generating civilians.
Others have recently looked at how to prevent suicidal thoughts among soldiers, or found those studying at important Iranian military academies reported significant discrimination on the basis of their families’ poverty or ethnic background.
“They give you insights into the day-to-day life in the Iranian military,” Connell said.
Source:
www.ft.com
