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A U.S. Navy serviceman stands near F/A-18 Hornet warplanes on the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson, a U.S. nuclear powered aircraft carrier on Dec. 27, 2011. (Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty Images)
Iran has threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz—a “choke point” in the Persian Gulf through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—if the West imposes sanctions against Iran’s petroleum exports. This threat is not without historic parallel.
In 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and launched its war against the United States after Washington blockaded oil shipments to Tokyo. Japan relied on 80 percent of its oil from the United States; oil sales make up 80 percent of Iran’s exports. A complete oil embargo on Iran, just as it would have done to Imperial Japan, would result in economic calamity.
Like all historic analogies, this one is imperfect: President Roosevelt’s oil embargo was not without cause as Imperial Japan had invaded Manchuria and was ravaging the rest of China and Indochina. In contrast, Iran has invaded no country and exhibits no intent to do so.
Western concern instead rests on the speculation that Iran’s nuclear program could result in the development of a nuclear weapon and conjecture that once so armed, Iran would intimidate neighboring states into subservience and achieve hegemony in the Persian Gulf at the expense of the West.
Outgunned in the Gulf
In nearly every measurement of military power, Iran is overshadowed by the firepower of the neighboring Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a six-member organization consisting of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While never saying so, the six monarchies created the coalition in 1981 to fend off the destabilizing political aftershocks sparked by Iran’s 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.
Its members are Arab and predominately Sunni (except in Bahrain where the ruling elite are Sunni but nearly 70 percent of the population is Shi’ite); Iran in contrast is Persian and majority Shi’ite. The impending membership of the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco reinforces the conservative nature of the GCC. Assuring the longevity of the royal families rather than establishing regional cooperation is the organization’s reason for being. Yemen, another non-Gulf Arab state, is seeking GCC membership.
Iran surpasses the GCC in one important military metric: the number of military troops. But as the United States wars against Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated, modern day military victories are decided not by the size of armies but by how quickly and forcibly a country can project its sophisticated munitions against a rival. And in this latter category, Iran suffers distinct weaknesses.
According to Iran and the Gulf Military Balance, published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the GCC (including Yemen) surpasses Iran in nearly every type of conventional weapon. In many cases, the Arab/Sunni coalition possesses two or three times the number of key armaments than does Iran.
Iran similarly falls short in the crucial arena of air superiority, where control of the skies often means victory on the ground. The CSIS study calculates that in the category of “modern” warplanes, Iran’s 190-plane air force confronts a GCC air force of 576 planes. But Iran is far worse off than the numbers suggest: a decades-old Western-led arms embargo on Iran has made it nearly impossible for the Islamic Republic to purchase modern warplanes or advanced weapons technology.
The most sophisticated aircraft in Iran’s inventory includes out-of-date Russian MiGs and U.S.-made F-4s and F-14s bought before the 1979 revolution. It also acquired in 1991 some French-made combat aircraft that Iraqi pilots flew into Iran while escaping U.S. warplanes. But the reliability of those planes is questionable because, as one military analyst put it, the “Iranians have extraordinary difficulty sustaining their military equipment due to a lack of spare parts and trained mechanics.”
Continued on the next page … Comparative Military Budgets
