Decades Of Military Neglect Made Israel’s Deadly Iran Strikes Possible

The opening salvo of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion air campaign against Iran on Friday was completely unprecedented and seemed like an all but unstoppable aerial juggernaut. However, the beleaguered state of Iran’s conventional armed forces and its lack of preparedness in the face of these deadly strikes shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, there was overwhelming evidence that Iran’s rulers willfully neglected Iran’s conventional defenses for decades in favor of building paramilitary forces within and beyond its national borders.

Israel’s wave of airstrikes targeted military and nuclear sites across Iran and assassinated military officials and nuclear scientists on Friday. Iranians in Tehran, the northwestern city of Tabriz, and the western cities of Boroujerd and Kermanshah reported hearing explosions. Civilians were among those killed. Israel also bombed Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility, Natanz. Already, Rising Lion appears much more extensive than Israel’s deadly night of airstrikes on October 26, which targeted Iran’s strategic air defense and missile production facilities.

The possibility of an attack was crystal clear in the preceding weeks, with several indications that Israel was readily preparing for it.

Aged air force

In statements that have aged like milk, Iranian officials repeatedly reiterated in recent weeks that air defenses battered in the previous October strike were completely repaired and restored and the air force fully prepared to counter any threat. Despite these pronouncements, Israel’s aerial armada appeared to strike Iran with near impunity.

The sheer neglect of Iran’s conventional military was long self-evident in its air force, which has become embarrassingly obsolescent compared to most of its counterparts in neighboring states.

“The IRIAF (Islamic of Iran Air Force) is ready to provide a decisive defense of the country’s airspace under any circumstances,” declared the commander of the IRIAF, Brig. Gen. Hamid Vahedi, on June 1.

The brigadier general also emphasized how training has contributed to ensuring operational readiness for IRIAF pilots and technicians.

The following day, as if on cue to demonstrate the readiness of IRIAF fighters, Iranian state media shared a “captivating video” of a Soviet-built IRIAF MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jet taking off with a “powerful roar” from Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. The video also showed the aircraft emitting black smoke from its twin engines, a typical characteristic of that fighter type. Iran tasks its Fulcrums with guarding the airspace above its sprawling capital city.

Despite this, preliminary reports indicate that on Friday morning, non-stealthy fourth-generation Israeli F-16s armed with small-diameter bombs flew less than 50 miles outside the heart of Tehran. And the IRIAF only managed to scramble a single MiG-29 to defend the entire capital!

On several occasions in recent weeks, IRIAF commander Vahedi extolled the supposed capabilities and preparedness of the air force and its personnel.

In early May, he said the IRIAF is on “the front line of rapid response to any threat” facing Iran. Less than a week later, he declared that the “powerful air force” was “at its highest level of preparedness” and “fully capable and ready” to defend Iran’s airspace with “maximum strength and determination.”

“Thanks to the tireless efforts of our personnel, every fighter jet in the Air Force has now been outfitted with state-of-the-art, locally produced weaponry and long-range missile systems,” he added.

However, even a cursory comparison to the air forces of Iran’s neighbors shows how far behind Iran’s once mighty air force has truly fallen, irrespective of what Vahedi would have had his domestic audiences believe before Friday.

For example, the “captivating” MiG-29 takeoff from Mehrabad earlier this month didn’t dispel the objective reality that its airframe is at least 35 years old. Furthermore, the MiG-29s obtained by Iran from the Soviet Union in 1990 are the more basic earlier models of the Fulcrum. Iran hasn’t made any substantial upgrades to them in the preceding decades, such as bringing them up to the more modernized MIG-29SMT configuration, as Russia has done with some of its older Fulcrums.

Iranian F-14A Tomcats, which were top-of-the-line when introduced, have received substantial and creative domestic upgrades and modifications over the decades. Still, their airframes are approximately half a century old, their lifespan doubtlessly nearing an end , and their best-before date long in the rearview mirror. It’s barely worth pointing out the obvious that third-generation IRIAF F-4 Phantom IIs and F-5 Tigers are among the last in service anywhere in the world, and upgrades and modernized domestically-made derivatives do little to obscure that undeniable reality.

The situation is even more dire when one compares and contrasts the IRIAF’s arsenal with that of its neighbors. As previously covered in this space, the Arab Gulf states to Iran’s west fly cutting-edge 4.5-generation fighter jets, with many more currently on order. Turkey currently has 40 of the most modern F-16s, the Block 70, on order from the United States and may soon gain readmission into the fifth-generation F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter project. Ankara hopes it can buy at least 40 F-35As. Additionally, it’s developing a stealth fighter, the TF Kaan, which it expects to introduce into service by the end of the decade.

China has offered to sell Pakistan—which boasted of shooting Indian fighter jets, including French Rafales during the brief May 7-10 conflict—40 fifth-generation Shenyang J-35 stealth jets. Islamabad has already acquired and fielded China’s advanced 4.5-generation Chengdu J-10C and the long-range PL-15 air-to-air missile, a capability that is already more advanced than anything in the IRIAF. Tehran had reportedly sought J-10Cs from China in recent years but has been unsuccessful in its efforts to date.

Revealingly, in the brief tit-for-tat Iran-Pakistan strikes against their respective frontier regions in January 2024, Iran relied entirely on drones and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles to hit alleged militant targets in Pakistani territory. Conversely, Pakistan retaliated using its fighter jets armed with standoff munitions, confidently striking targets inside Iran that it also claimed belonged to militant groups.

Iran has pinned its hopes on acquiring Su-35 Flankers from Russia and confirmed its purchase in January. A widely held assumption in recent years has been that the 24 Su-35s Russia initially built for Egypt before Cairo canceled the contract would be delivered to Tehran instead. However, satellite images released in April confirmed that Russia delivered some of these jets to Algeria.

Acquiring a dozen or so Flankers would do little to fundamentally alter the balance of airpower between Iran and most of its neighbors. At best, they could supplement or replace some of those Fulcrums currently patrolling Tehran’s airspace or serve as training aircraft to help Iranian pilots master a 4.5-generation aircraft as they await additional acquisitions that could well be a long time coming.

Even in the highly unlikely event that Tehran eventually acquires 50 Flankers, the original number it reportedly ordered and fully paid for in 2021, that would still pale in comparison to Turkey potentially flying 40 F-35s on one side and Pakistan flying 40 J-35s on the other. Of course, that’s not even accounting for the 75 F-35s Israel will eventually operate in the coming years.

Forward defense to national defenselessness

Much of the initial news analysis about Rising Lion noted it’s likely the most significant attack Iran has endured since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. However, it goes without saying that Israel is a much more powerful and sophisticated opponent than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever was or could dream of being.

The neglect of the IRIAF and the rest of Iran’s regular armed forces goes all the way back to that time. After the 1979 revolution, the new Islamist regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini distrusted the military built by the former Shah. He purged much of the former regime’s military and established the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps paramilitary to safeguard the new regime. The ruling regime has favored the IRGC over the regular army ever since, with the latter amassing more funds and weaponry.

Aside from favoring the IRGC, Tehran devised a forward defense strategy, calculating that if it established or helped friendly militias in weak states across the region, it could defend its territory from the outside. Adherence to that policy saw Iran first establish Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early 1980s and later prop up and back Shia militias in Iraq and the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Together, these groups and regimes formed the self-styled Axis of Resistance.

Iran justified its intervention in Syria as necessary for its national defense. Iranian cleric Hojjat al-Islam Mehdi Taeb once dubbed Syria Iran’s 35th province, arguing that keeping Syria would be more important than keeping Iran’s Khuzestan border province, which Saddam Hussein infamously invaded in 1980. “If we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran,” he said.

Since the current series of regional wars began after Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli military has taken several covert and overt actions to dismantle the entire Axis. It decapitated Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful and prized proxy, through last year’s pager operation, which was swiftly followed by a campaign of bombing its strategic weaponry and assassinating its senior leadership. These strategic blows against Hezbollah directly contributed to the overthrow of the Assad regime mere weeks later.

Iran’s regime believed that the Axis would facilitate its forward defense strategy and place a “ring of fire” around Israel. Israel, in turn, invoked an octopus analogy to sum up Iran and its regional proxies, insisting that instead of forever fending off individual tentacles, it would strike directly at the head: Tehran. It did just that on Friday.

Prioritizing forward defense and favoring the IRGC and other militias at the expense of its conventional armed forces has resulted in Iran enduring the most severe direct threat to its territory in over 40 years.

Interestingly, the last Shah—who, unlike the incumbent regime, prioritized acquiring the best conventional armaments available for the Iranian military—once criticized Israel’s attempts to justify territorial expansion on security grounds.

“Israel is making a big mistake in relying on occupied Arab territories for its security,” he told an American journalist in the 1970s.

“In these days of long-range planes flying at 80,000 feet, and ground-to-ground missiles which go over any obstacle, there is no such thing as secure borders for Israel. … The only security for Israel is an international guarantee of its former borders.”

By willfully neglecting national defense in favor of its inherently flawed forward defense doctrine that tread upon the sovereignty of regional countries, Tehran’s rulers all but guaranteed that the Iranian homeland would inevitably become vulnerable to attack again—as it did shortly after they initially seized power 46 years ago.