Cordesman/Wilner, Iran & The Gulf Military Balance Rev 3
AHC 2/29/12
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The Limits to Iran’s Air Power Air power is probably the key to conventional combat in the Gulf region and any purely conventional, large-scale US/GCC engagement with Iran – although such a struggle would probably involve significant naval elements and be an air-sea battle. Figures III.4 and III.5 show that Iran lags badly behind the Gulf states in modernizing its air forces. Iran’s most advanced fighters consist of a small number of export versions of the Su-24 and MiG-29, whose avionics lag far behind their Russian counterparts. These limits to Iran’s air force are particularly important as Iran has air bases that are only a few minutes flight time from critical targets in the Gulf and in the coastal areas of the southern Gulf states. They are also important because Iran’s weaknesses in air-to-air combat, and its weaknesses in surface-to-air missile defense which are described shortly, leave it highly vulnerable to any US or US and Gulf attack and vulnerable to a major preventive strike by Israel. The Uncertainties Affecting Iran’s Air Capabilities There are some important aspects of Iran’s air capabilities that cannot be estimated on the basis of unclassified reporting. Taken at face value, Iran’s air force is something of a military museum. It is a tribute to Iran’s airmen that it can keep so many of its US-supplied and older Russian and Chinese aircraft flying, but none of the Western-supplied aircraft in Iran’s inventory have been modernized by the US since the fall of the Shah. This is a critical shortcoming since their US-flown counterparts – especially the 44 F-14s and 65 F-4D aircraft still in Iranian service – went through a long series of Multi-Stage Improvement Programs (MSIPs) to correct design problems, improve flight performance and sortie generation capability, and modernize their avionics and radars for air-to-air and air-to-ground/sea operations. Similarly, it is unclear that Russia ever systematically modernized Iran’s early export versions of the 30 Su-24 and 35 MiG-29 – which lack the radar and avionics performance of their counterparts in Russian service. Iran claims to have modernized the avionics on some of these aircraft, and to have adapted its F14s to carry the Hawk air-to-surface missile as a long-range air-to-air missile to compensate for the fact its F-14s were sabotaged during the fall of the Shah and cannot make effective use of Phoenix missiles – which in any case are long beyond their useful life. It also claims to have created electronic warfare aircraft and to have modernized the avionics on its 3 PF-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft – which are as close to an AWACs/airborne warning and control aircraft as Iran has. It also has claimed to have a mix of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs and UAVs) it can use to make up for some of the limitation in its aircraft. Iran has developed significant software skills and does produce some competent electronic warfare equipment. It is highly uncertain, however, that Iran can produce anything like the integrated capabilities necessary to systematically modernize its aircraft, and make them competitive in either munitions delivery or electronic warfare. It is also unclear that Iran has anything like the test facilities to determine how effective its modifications would be against US air forces and ships, and a properly trained modern Southern Gulf air force. There is no way to make such estimates without access to classified electronic order of battle and exercise data. Moreover, one reason that Arab air forces have lost so decisively to Israel in past wars is that they could not generate anything like the surge sortie numbers, and sustain sortie numbers, that 33