Iran’s military forces combine state-of-the-art drones and hackers with out-of-date conventional weapons

Six weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombardment have served to degrade Iran’s nuclear facilities and cripple parts of its military.

But the Islamic Republic’s offensive capabilities have been built up over nearly 50 years, during which Iran has been either at war or under the threat of conflict.

As an expert in military history and theory, I believe that to understand what may come next in Operation Epic Fury, it’s valuable to grasp the development of Iran’s modern military structure, capabilities and international activities.

Iranian military technology

Prior to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Iran’s military was largely supplied by Western powers, particularly the United States.

It entered the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 with a substantial amount of then-modern equipment. That included nearly 80 F-14 fighter aircraft, over 200 F-4 and F-5 aircraft and thousands of tanks.

But Iran’s military was exhausted when the war ended in 1988. And the government had by then become a world pariah, making resupply all but impossible.

Although Iran imported some military equipment from the Soviet Union and China in 1990, its economy could not support substantial military spending.

Ironically, the arms embargoes that Iran faced during and after its war with Iraq made the regime self-reliant on its weapons stockpiles. And that triggered the development of a substantial domestic arms industry.

Most modern Iranian military equipment consists of reverse-engineered American and Soviet equipment, much of it obsolete. Since 1990, however, Iranian missile technology has substantially improved. That’s due to domestic production and importing expertise from other marginalized states, such as North Korea.

Starting in the 1990s, Iran also innovated a series of one-way attack drones, a relatively inexpensive way to attack distant targets.

The modern Iranian military

The Iranian military is split into the regular military, or “Artesh,” and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Artesh plays a domestic defense role akin to a militia, while the Revolutionary Guard serves as the more professional military force.

The Revolutionary Guard projects regional power. During the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, for instance, it provided improvised explosive devices to insurgents targeting American forces.

The Revolutionary Guard tends to receive the bulk of Iranian military resources, including the best personnel and equipment. Quds Force, the unconventional warfare wing of the Revolutionary Guard, has long played a role in exporting the revolutionary beliefs of the Iranian rulers. The Quds Force provides arms and guidance to proxies throughout the Middle East, primarily by fomenting insurrections against Arab Sunni governments.

Iran has long been the patron of Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, whose primary goal is the eradication of Israel. More recently, Iran has also engaged in substantial support of Hamas in Gaza, despite the fact that Hamas is a Sunni organization, while the rulers of Iran are members of the Shiite branch of Islam.

Iran has constantly sought means of exerting military influence beyond its borders, without risking external attack. It has embraced the use of cyber warfare, a method of attack with a relatively low cost for participation and a potentially outsized influence on the world stage.

Iranian hackers have attacked Western military and government networks, including a hack of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal emails. Iranian-backed hackers have also launched attacks on infrastructure and cultural institutions, including U.S. wastewater treatment plants and electrical grids.

Iran’s pursuit of atomic weaponry

Iran’s government has relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons since at least the 1980s.

The Iranian government has always maintained that its nuclear program is to provide power for the developing nation, rather than weaponry. But definitive evidence of uranium enrichment far beyond the requirements of power generation have caused Western states to demand an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

In 2010, cybersecurity researcher Sergey Ulasen discovered an incredibly complex malware program, dubbed Stuxnet, that was created to undermine the Iranian nuclear program by disrupting the function of enrichment centrifuges. No nation has ever taken responsibility for the attack, which set back Iranian uranium enrichment efforts by years.

In 2015, after negotiations with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, Iran agreed to halt its uranium enrichment program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The negotiations resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

Although the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018, the agreement continued to function, and Iran seemed poised to reenter the global economy.

However, in 2020 the Iranians restarted their nuclear program. They also ramped up production of ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones.

In June 2025, the United States and Israel launched a massive aerial attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, an effort that Trump characterized as having destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran responded by launching a wave of ballistic missiles and drones toward Israel, most of which were intercepted before entering Israeli airspace.

The missile and interceptor war

Prior to Operation Epic Fury, analysts estimated that Iran possessed 3,000 ballistic missiles and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones. They also concluded that Iran had a substantial production capacity to increase its stockpiles.

In the first six weeks of the current conflict, Iran expended at least 650 missiles in attacks on Israel and hundreds more against other targets in the region.

The U.S. has placed a heavy emphasis on attacking missile production and storage facilities. But it’s difficult to ascertain how many missiles and drones the Iranian military might still possess.

Iranian production and transportation has almost certainly sustained substantial losses in capacity. And U.S. and Israeli aircraft prowl the skies over Iran seeking signs of mobile launchers or attempts to transport missiles to firing locations.

The rate of Iranian missile fire has substantially declined since the first days of the conflict, but it has never dropped to zero. That has led some analysts to suspect that Iran maintains a significant cache of long-range weaponry in reserve, while U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth argues that it has lost the capacity to launch major barrages.

Paul J. Springer is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His comments represent his own opinion and do not reflect the official policy of the United States Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Air Force.