The recent news about the change of leadership at the “Sepah Pasadaran” got me to thinking about how absurdly inefficient the current Iranian defense structure is. Take a country with a limited amount of resources available to allocate to its defense needs, then find yourself forced to split those resources between two identical organizations (the “Artesh”, and the “Sepah”) created, in parallel, to meet the defense needs of that country?!?! Why the duplication of costs? It just does not make sense by any metrics. A more sensible approach might be to acknowledge that it is time to rehabilitate Iran’s professional military, knowing that the passage of time has removed any vestiges of elements who placed loyalty to a certain individual above loyalty to country and constitution, focusing resources on creating a world-class professional military, with the “Sepah” being relegated more to a secondary role as a national militia (such as the National Guard in the United States.) Along the same lines, Iran’s defense establishment needs to come to terms with the reality that focusing their resources so heavily on land forces to the exclusion of air power is tantamount to foregone defeat…having superior land forces without the ability to protect/control the airspace above them is like having no land forces at all (particularly given Iran’s barren geography), so a concerted effort needs to be made to reconstitute Iran’s badly neglected air force into an effective (and perhaps the paramount) branch of the armed forces, with highly trained professional personnel and pilots, and state of the art equipment.
