Iran’s military forces combine state-of-the-art drones and hackers with out-of-date conventional weapons

Key Points:

• Six weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombardment have degraded Iran’s nuclear facilities and damaged parts of its military, but Iran’s offensive capabilities have been developed over nearly 50 years of conflict and threat.
• Iran’s military is divided between the regular Artesh, focused on domestic defense, and the more professional Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which projects regional power and supports proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
• Iran has developed a substantial domestic arms industry, reverse-engineering obsolete Western and Soviet equipment, improving missile technology, and innovating one-way attack drones with expertise from states like North Korea.
• Iran’s nuclear program, pursued since the 1980s, led to the 2015 JCPOA agreement to halt uranium enrichment, but Iran resumed its nuclear and missile programs after the U.S. withdrawal from the deal in 2018, prompting recent U.S.-Israeli strikes.
• During the ongoing conflict, Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, while U.S. and Israeli forces have targeted Iranian missile production and storage facilities, though Iran’s remaining missile capacity remains uncertain.