For the second time in less than a year, a ceasefire has been called on a genocide being carried out by imperialism. And for the second time, there is much debate about the decision by the resistance leadership to agree to such a ceasefire and negotiations.
We believe the evaluation of any such decision should be made principally by the Iranian people themselves, and they are perfectly capable of forming their will and acting upon it. Those who support Iran from afar should ensure that the expression of their opinions does not interfere with that internal process.
For now, what is evident and important is that U.S. imperialism has failed in its principal war aim, which was not merely to kill Iranians or destroy military and civilian infrastructure, but to subjugate Iran. Not only has it failed to do so, but on the contrary Iran has demonstrated its capacity to endure the most terrible assaults and overcome attempts at subjugation; and that capacity remains basically intact in case U.S. imperialism ventures to try again. That in itself is a historic victory by Iran, one which will reverberate profoundly across the world, particularly among Third World countries.
At the same time, it is clear that neither has the basic character of either the U.S. or Israel changed, nor have they abandoned their long-term aims, nor have they lost all their strength. They will keep trying to find other ways to achieve their aims, and may even resort to worse horrors. As such, for anyone to take this to be a final victory would also be a delusion. What the Gaza and Iran ceasefires signify is that the struggle against imperialism must yet go through many twists and turns and cunning passages. And so people must be prepared for even grimmer struggles to come.
For now, we must grasp the nature of this victory, however partial and qualified.
How has Iran continued to resist?
If the outcome of wars were decided by the stockpile and sophistication of weapons alone, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran should have been over on March 1 itself, so great is the imbalance of equipment and resources between the two sides. Two weeks into the aggression, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced to the press that “Iran has no air defenses. Iran has no air force. Iran has no Navy….” He exulted:
We said it would not be a fair fight and it has not been…. [T]he combination of the world’s two most powerful air forces is unprecedented and unbeatable. Between our Air Force and that of the Israelis, over 15,000 enemy targets have been struck. That’s well over 1,000 a day.1
Iran has fought this war virtually on its own (its main assistance has come from its even more embattled resistance allies in the region), and largely with its own weaponry.2 Iran is a Third World country, labouring under harsh imperialist sanctions for decades. It is now facing aggression by an imperialist superpower along with the region’s most technologically advanced military power. How has it continued to resist? What is Iran’s military strategy?
The facts we cite below are widely reported. However, certain political implications of these facts may have been missed, in particular, the role of the Iranian people.
Iran’s strategy of defence, and its implications
The U.S. and Israel have not yet put soldiers on the ground; the aggression on Iran has been waged from the air, largely by missiles.3 Since Iran lacks missile defence, i.e., interceptors which knock out incoming missiles, its enemies could fire missiles at it at will, constrained only by the quantum of weapons at their disposal.4
Iran’s only ‘defence’ against these incoming missiles has been its counter-attack, in the form of missiles and drones, and more than a month of intense U.S.-Israeli bombing has not succeeded in destroying that capability. By imposing an economic and political price on its adversaries, and by knocking out critical military infrastructure of the U.S. in the region, Iran has aimed to eventually stop the aggression.
In the meantime, however, the U.S. and Israel have already slaughtered civilians and bombed hospitals, pharmaceutical factories, universities, schools and bridges, attempting to reverse the development of Iran’s economy and society to a primitive level (to the “Stone Age”, in Trump’s words). The Iranian government must have taken this into account, and it must have been prepared for a large death toll of its own civilians. We shall return to the significance of this point later.
Missile deployment for a protracted defensive war
Facing missile attacks by a West-backed Iraq in the war of 1980-88, Iran acquired a few Scud missiles from Libya and North Korea and set about reverse-engineering them. It now has an impressive range of missiles of different ranges, and in the last decade it has given priority to improving the precision of their targeting.5
Harking back to forces elsewhere in the world that have successfully challenged U.S. imperialism over the decades, Iran has dug its shelters deep into the earth. Its missiles are stored in tunnels spread throughout the country over dozens of underground bases, at depths unreachable by U.S. and Israeli munitions—“proof that Iran has been preparing for a war like this for years and possibly decades.”6 The missiles are taken out on mobile missile launchers, fired, and the launchers are hidden back in the mountain. CNN claims that there are dozens of such underground bases.
The U.S. and Israel have been monitoring these sites and, says Hegseth, “we’re hunting them down.” Thus, five days into the war, the Wall Street Journal declared that Iran’s strategy was “beginning to look like a blunder”, since U.S. and Israeli war planes were bombing the entrances, entombing the weapons below ground. “We’re hunting Iran’s last remaining ballistic missile launchers to eliminate what I would characterize as their lingering ballistic missile capability,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East.7 The U.S. claimed that a reduction in daily Iranian missile launches was proof that they had put most sites out of action.
However, almost a month after Cooper’s boast, Iran was launching 10-20 missiles at Israel alone per day, and their strike rate was improving. The reduction in launches per day was part of a well-planned switching of gears: Iran was (and is) fighting a more protracted war, in which it maintains a steady stream of launches for a long period.8 Moreover, the tunnel entrances hit by U.S. bombing appear to have been only temporarily affected, and were either re-excavated within days or used alternative entrances. And many of the US’s apparently successful strikes may have been wasted on the numerous decoys planted by Iran.9
The “poor man’s cruise missile”
Even more remarkable is the story of Iran’s humble drones. These testify to Iran’s resourcefulness in the course of four decades under constant threat of aggression by U.S. imperialism and its partners in the region, and in the face of pervasive sanctions. The International Institute for Strategic Studies says, without intending irony:
Tehran has also benefitted from being able to examine a number of other nations’ UAV designs, mainly those of the U.S., that it has had access to as a result of losses either due to technical problems or hostile action.10
Iran’s Shahed drones seem toys by the standards of the U.S. and Israeli weapons: 8 feet wide and 12 feet long, the Shaheds carry 30-50 kg warheads, and their top speed is just 115 miles per hour. By comparison, the world’s first cruise missile, the German V-1 rocket of 1944 during World War II, carried an 850 kg warhead with a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour. The speed of the Shahed drones is comparable to World War I planes. There is, of course, a huge difference in the precision of targeting.
The Shaheds are an example of what used to be called, in development economics of the 1960s and 70s, ‘appropriate technology’:
— they are simple and cheap to manufacture;
— their manufacturing lead times (i.e., from start to finish of the production process) are short;
— they can be fashioned out of cheap, off-the-shelf commercial components used in civilian equipment, the imports of which are difficult to track;
— they can be manufactured in any number of small workshops located throughout the country;
— they can be moved in the bed of a large pick-up truck, making them difficult to detect;
— and they can be launched from a rail-based rack off the back of a commercial-grade truck. They can thus be produced in large numbers, moved to any location, and fired. “The problem with a technology like that is it’s become democratized,” says Maximilian Bremer a former chief of the Advanced Programs Division at the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command.11
It seems the U.S. has no idea how many drones Iran has: “Estimates… vary widely—from thousands to tens of thousands.”12 Since drones can be produced in such large numbers, they can be used to swarm and overburden aerial defenses. Each intercepted drone too plays a role, by exhausting the interceptors of the adversary.
Military analysts refer to drones, quite appropriately, as the “poor man’s cruise missile.”13 Iran’s drones cost $20,000-50,000 each; the U.S. and Gulf nations have been shooting these down with Patriot missiles that cost $4 million each, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles that cost $12.8 million each, and ship-based ballistic missile interceptors that cost between $10 million and $28 million each.14
Using fighter jets to down drones may be even more expensive: London’s Financial Times reports: “Advanced fighter jets have been mobilised across the Gulf this month to hunt down enemies they were never designed to fight: waves of slow-moving and low-flying attack drones fired by Iran.”15 It costs more than $25,000 an hour to keep a single F-16 fighter in the air. The F-16, optimised for combat at 445-1186 miles per hour, “must slow down almost to stall speed to deal with the puttering low-tech machines.”16 It then shoots down the drone with munitions which may cost $500,000-$1 million each.
While the U.S. government is reluctant to discuss how much it has spent so far, its Department of War asked Congress for another $200 bn in funding for the war. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the figure “could move”—“It takes money to kill bad guys”.17
Critical damage inflicted by drones
Iran’s strategists made two simple but startling calculations which the Pentagon appears to have missed. These are brought out in a note by J.P. Morgan, the U.S. investment bank:
While drone payloads are much smaller [than missile payloads], (a) it only takes small payloads to cause tremendous damage to much more expensive aircraft, ships and radar systems, and (b) drones carry more payload per unit cost than many missile systems.18
The implications of this can be seen in the results achieved. Iran has launched over 3,000 drones since it was attacked by Israel and the U.S. on February 28, most at targets in the Gulf. While the majority of them have been intercepted,
some have got through to hit military bases, energy installations and civilian infrastructure, sometimes with remarkable precision.19
The drones that got through destroyed or put out of action (among other things) critical air-defence and satellite communication systems. The BBC says: “Radar and satellite systems have been a focus [of Iran’s missile and drone strikes] from the start… They function as the eyes and ears of modern military operations.” Without those eyes and ears, missile defence systems cannot function. Indeed, so extensive was the damage to U.S. radar in places such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Jordan that the U.S. was forced to haul in missile defence systems from South Korea.20
While the U.S. military reported having nearly 40,000 troops in the region when the war started, it has had to disperse thousands of them due to Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The significance of this needs to be grasped. As the New York Times points out, U.S. military bases in the region have been built up over a long period, and in particular during the invasion of Iraq;
Now, the war in Iran has made all of those bases vulnerable–to the point where service members can’t really live or work there for extended periods…. Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable, with the ones in Kuwait, which is next door to Iran, suffering perhaps the most damage.21
Among the hits: a U.S. Army tactical operations centre in Port Shuaiba (Kuwait); Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait; Camp Buehring, Kuwait; Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, the regional air headquarters of U.S. Central Command; the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain; and the Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia. Iran’s March 27 attack on the Prince Sultan base knocked out the critical Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) E-3 plane—this loss, say top experts, is “incredibly problematic, given how crucial these battle managers are” to all operations.22
As a result, while retaining on location pilots and crews directly needed for missions and maintenance, the U.S. has evacuated much of the land-based military, some as far away as Europe, some to hotels and other civilian locations in the region. In effect, as Iran has pointed out, the U.S. is using civilians of the region as human shields. Iran has urged people to report these new locations as it hunts for the concealed U.S. troops, and it has issued a warning to hotel owners in the region that hosting U.S. military personnel could make their properties legitimate military targets.
Iran’s second navy
At the start of this war Iran had two navies. One was a conventional navy, the Artesh navy, consisting of larger surface ships and two large submarines, operating in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. These have proved sitting ducks for U.S. and Israeli strikes, and were either sunk or put out of action within days.
The second was a ‘mosquito fleet’—the navy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. This has largely survived the bombing. It is entirely different from the regular navy: It consists of large numbers of cheap vehicles and weapons, which can operate in swarms, saturating the defences of larger vessels. These include hundreds of armed speedboats, nearly two dozen midget submarines, numerous uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) and uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), thousands of naval mines, and swimmer delivery vehicles.
All these are tailor-made for the Gulf’s geography and the conditions of the Strait, which Iran has spent decades studying and training its personnel to operate in. These vessels/vehicles can operate in waters as shallow as 30 metres, take advantage of the noisy environment to avoid sonar detection, and harry the enemy. They are supported from the coast by truck-mounted missiles and drones, hidden in bunkers and tunnels within mountains adjacent to the Strait.
The IRGCN’s entire doctrine, training, and equipment procurement were optimized for exactly one scenario, that of denying the Strait of Hormuz to a technologically superior adversary. That is the war Iran is now fighting.23
This strange fleet was created by the strenuous yet patient efforts of Iran over long years under sanctions. It managed to acquire a superfast British speedboat, dismantle and reverse-engineer it to produce hundreds of armed speedboats; it spun this knowledge off to make an unmanned suicide speedboat to ram into enemy vessels; it used the know-how it gathered making aerial drones to make its own underwater drones (UUVs); and it imported a North Korean midget submarine and reverse-engineered it to produce nearly two dozen. All of these were done at low cost, enabling their production in large numbers. (To take one example, the US’s Ohio class submarine is 6 times as long, weighs 150 times as much, and costs 180 times as much, as an Iranian midget sub. Yet it would be a sitting duck in the Strait of Hormuz.)
On the ground
As we mentioned at the outset, the U.S. and Israel have not yet attempted a ground invasion. This is despite the fact that they cannot get control of Iran (‘regime change’) without a ground invasion. The reason for the U.S.-Israeli hesitation is clear: in a country in which the people are prepared to resist, invaders on the ground are at a severe disadvantage, as the U.S. has learned in Vietnam and elsewhere, and Israel has learned in Gaza. The people of Iran are not waiting for U.S. and Israeli troops with garlands. Rather, it is credibly reported that 14 million Iranians have volunteered to fight to the death for the defence of their country. At that point all the lessons of guerrilla warfare will apply with even greater force.
Even landing a major expeditionary force in Iran would present challenges, let alone occupying the country. While Iran has little or no missile defences, its air defences demonstrated their effectiveness by shooting down a U.S. A-10 aircraft (designed to provide close air support to ground troops), two C-130 transport aircraft, two Black Hawk helicopters, and even an F-15 fighter aircraft.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, it faced a traditional standing army with centralised command, led by a general staff at the top. In 22 days U.S. forces reached Baghdad. By that point the Iraqi army had crumbled, for a number of reasons, among them the possible buying-off of some top Iraqi officers. Once the U.S. captured Baghdad and other major cities, the war was over.
The structure of Iran’s armed forces is entirely different, and will pose different challenges to any invasion.
Iran’s mosaic defence
The structure of the Iranian State today is a legacy of the 1979 Revolution. That historic event overthrew the Shah, a U.S. puppet, and thus permanently pitted Iran against U.S. imperialism. The Revolution also had an impact on Iran’s social order, but it did not overturn it, and class divisions have remained and reproduced themselves over the years.
Iran’s armed forces consist of two parallel forces, the 420,000-strong traditional army (Artesh) and the 190,000-strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In theory, the Artesh is to defend the country’s territory while the IRGC is to defend the Islamic Revolution itself. Thus the IRGC is given greater ideological education and motivation. The IRGC is also in charge of the militia, the 450,000-strong Basij. The Artesh and the IRGC each have their own ground forces, air force, and navy. However, all these forces come under the command of the Armed Forces General Staff and Central Headquarters, and ultimately the Supreme Leader.
Keenly aware of U.S. imperialism’s longstanding plan to decapitate Iran’s leadership and seize power, Iran devised a ‘mosaic’ defence strategy, namely, “a multitude of autonomous tactical cells deployed across different sectors, capable of acting independently while remaining guided by pre-established strategic directives.”24 The IRGC units in each region/province can call upon the regional Basij forces during times of crisis. Each unit has its own military, including intelligence capabilities, weapons, and command-and-control.
What seems to be an inefficiency—extensive duplication of resources—is necessary in Iran, in conditions in which the central leadership is vulnerable to attacks. By building in redundancy at every level (multiple actors performing the same function), the system ensures that decapitation at the centre does not immobilise the regions. This has been proven in practice, with the U.S. assassinating the Iranian leadership on the very first day of the war, and continuing to assassinate top leaders thereafter, with hardly any effect on Iran’s capacity to fight.
Underlying principles
This is a remarkable achievement, for which it is difficult to find a historical precedent. However, while Iran’s strategy has many new features, it unmistakably draws on certain longstanding principles of guerrilla war and protracted war. These are principles whereby a smaller and more backward military force that enjoys the support of the people can, over time, overcome a larger and more advanced military force. It is unusual to see a State power with a standing army drawing on this body of military thinking, which has in the main guided various liberation forces worldwide .
Going by these principles, a smaller and militarily backward force chooses to engage with the enemy not in the manner, time and location chosen by the enemy, but fights in its own way, at a time and place of its choosing, when it is in an advantageous tactical position. It combines decentralised command in specific campaigns and battles with centralised strategic command; ensures the self-reliant capability of the armed forces, arming them and the people with available weapons; and uses these weapons in a way that minimises its own disadvantages and exploits the weaknesses of the enemy.
Behind this is the understanding that weapons do not decide everything in war. While they are an important factor, in the final analysis people, not things, are decisive. In the course of a protracted war, there is scope for the weaker military force to change the balance of strengths of the two sides, without prematurely seeking decisive engagements. How long that course might be partly depends on a number of objective national and international conditions, but success is ultimately decided by the actual leadership in the war, and whether it is able to draw on its strengths to overcome its disadvantages.
Just as weapons do not decide everything in war, nor does geography. The mere geography of the Hormuz Strait did not in itself provide Iran a trump card, as some commentators seem to think. In order to exploit this geographical feature, Iran required a certain outlook, an outlook of self-reliance and resistance to imperialism.
Some commentators now conclude that Iran, by effectively resisting the combined assault of the U.S. and Israel, has emerged as a major military power on the world stage. This misses the point. Iran’s military strengths, as we have described them above, are not fitted for exercising domination abroad, but for defending themselves at home, in alliance with other resistance forces in the region. The political character of this force is essentially different from the forces of aggression led by its adversaries, the U.S. and Israel.
No doubt, 40 days is not a protracted war; but Iran has shown its readiness to fight such a war, and consequently the signs of a progressive shift in the balance of forces in favour of Iran have emerged. It is to pre-empt the fuller unfolding of this process, which would shift the balance further and further, that the U.S. has decided to negotiate. As such, even this 40-day war can be taken as an illustration of the concept of a protracted war.
Whether or not anything emerges from the current negotiations, it is certain that the U.S. and Israel will not change their character or basic drive. Nor have they permanently lost the capacity to attack. They will certainly keep on making trouble, even if they keep failing; equally, we can expect the people of this region to keep struggling, again and again, till their victory.
The shaping of people’s consciousness
As we stated at the outset, this strategy requires the people to undertake great sacrifices. There is no way of stopping the U.S. and Israel from firing missiles at Iran, slaughtering people, wiping out schools, universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical factories, bridges, power plants, water treatment plants, indeed all the prerequisites of a civilised existence. Iran can only retaliate, not prevent, and its retaliation will necessarily claim a much, much smaller toll, in numbers, than the sacrifice of its own people. This has been the case in every war waged by an oppressed nation against an imperialist power. In Vietnam, which the U.S. to this days views as causing a great loss of life of its own soldiers, the ratio of deaths was perhaps 60 Vietnamese to 1 U.S. soldier. Yet Vietnam finally liberated itself from U.S. imperialist rule.
In the case of Iran, it should be remembered that the status quo before the war was an intolerable one, whose effects on people’s lives over decades were comparable to that of a war. A widely-cited study by the leading medical journal Lancet in 2025 found that international sanctions, principally unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S., led to over half a million deaths a year worldwide, “a death toll similar to that of wars.”25 This must certainly be the case for Iran.
We get an idea of the impact of sanctions by looking at the period since 2018, when the U.S. re-imposed sanctions on Iran (after a few years of partial relief). The 2022 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of renewed sanctions on Iran during the preceding four years makes for harrowing reading.26 Foreign exchange earnings fell 62 per cent, the price of health care rose 67 per cent, the price of the food basket rose more than 300 per cent, and the official poverty rate rose by 11 per cent.
But more than these dry figures, the sheer targeted sadism and perversity of the sanctions is brought out by other facts: the blocking of essential equipment such as ambulances, medical equipment (including ventilators and CT scans during Covid), over 130 essential drugs for various diseases, even the software required for the management of the dosage of medications for patients of cancer and other diseases. Where 10 million doses were needed for the treatment of thalassemia patients, Iran was only able to obtain 1.5 million doses, leading to a quadrupling in mortality from the disease. A particularly grotesque instance concerns the medicines for the treatment of Iranian war veterans and civilians who survived nerve agent and mustard gas attacks during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. It was the U.S. that had egged on Iraq to invade Iran; it provided Iraq with the materials and financial support for manufacturing various chemical weapons; it drew up plans for their actual use by Iraq on Iran; it made preparations for protecting its own forces after the anticipated use of these weapons.27 All this was done as part of its overall (continuing) project of ousting the post-Revolution government in Iran. Now the U.S. blocks the medical treatment of the Iranian victims of those ghastly war crimes .
Not only the effect of sanctions on the health sector, but their effect on all sectors of the economy takes a toll in lives and in the quality of people’s lives, comparable to the toll of a war. Thus when the Iranian leadership and its people weigh the price of the current war against their condition before the war, they are not deterred by the current challenges.
The sanctions are only one manifestation, albeit a glaring one, of imperialist domination in the region. Beyond the narrow calculus of lives lost due to sanctions, the Iranian people would now be motivated by their realisation of the need for a great struggle against imperialism. That embraces the Palestinian struggle for liberation, the struggle of the Lebanese people in defence of their sovereignty, and many other similar bitter struggles in this region and elsewhere. This is reflected over and over in the expressions of the people on the streets. They express readiness for great sacrifices to remove the yoke of U.S. imperialism on them. They have, in a sense, nothing to lose by resisting, and everything to gain.
The subjective forces
Thus, contrary to western media notions that the Iranians are itching to oust the present government and install the former Shah’s son, the Iranian strategy of a protracted war is predicated on the support of the masses of Iranian people. Without such support, the assassination of virtually all of Iran’s top leadership by the U.S. and Israeli armed forces could have had unpredictable consequences.
Instead the succession (in some cases more than one such, as the next rung too were assassinated) took place quickly and effectively, and was endorsed by vast rallies of people who have been coming on the streets throughout the country, day after day, in the face of the missiles. This reflects the consciousness of the Iranian people of the need to fight U.S. imperialism unconditionally and uncompromisingly. They support their government precisely because it is fighting U.S. imperialism, and to the extent it continues to do so. In the face of Trump’s threat to wipe out Iranian civilisation itself, masses of people turned out to form human chains around the country’s power projects, bridges, and other infrastructure—a historic event, one worthy of the admiration of the world people.
By mobilising the Iranian people in support of its resistance, the Iranian government has also set in motion a political process with potentially profound consequences. Now the Iranian State is more dependent on their support, and they in turn manifest greater political assertion and ownership of it. In this context, the speech of the present Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, on April 10, the 40 th day of his father’s martyrdom, and the scheduled start of negotiations in Islamabad, is of great significance:
Today… it can be said that you, the heroic Iranian nation, are the definitive victors…. Your cries in the streets are effective in the outcome of the negotiations. What is essential is the continued presence of the people, just as in the past forty days. This presence is a pillar of Iran’s current strength. Even if negotiations begin, public presence must not diminish. The voices of the people influence negotiations.28 (emphases added)
A thoroughgoing fight against imperialism requires the democratic participation of the masses; and once in the field, the people have the potential to mould and re-mould their society and world in all respects.
Notes:
1.“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. Dan Caine Hold a Press Briefing”, March 13, 2026, U.S. Department of War,
https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434484/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-air-force-gen-da/
2.There are reports that Russia has provided Iran assistance in targeting missiles and drones, but these are attributed to unnamed sources. What is confirmed is that Iran is one of three countries in the region (along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) with full military access to China’s satellite navigation system, BeiDou, and this could have helped in targeting missiles and drones. However, Iran does not appear to be using Russian or Chinese weaponry. China stopped export of weapons to Iran in 2015, and has no formal defence ties with the latter. While Iran has imported dual-use commodities (i.e., items with both military and civilian uses, such as electronic components and drones) from China, so too have many other countries in the region, including Israel. “Given China’s extensive economic interests across the Middle East, Beijing balances its support for Iran with other critical trade and investment partners in the region. In 2025, China registered $108 billion in two-way trade with Saudi Arabia and $108 billion with the UAE, compared to $41.2 billion with Iran (including unreported oil imports).
Arab Gulf countries also present far greater investment, technology, and market access opportunities for Chinese companies than Iran.” China-Iran Fact Sheet: A Short Primer on the Relationship, March 16, 2026, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, https://www.uscc.gov/research/china-iran-fact-sheet-short-primer-relationship U.S. intelligence sources now (April 11) report that China is intending to supply Iran with weapons, but the Chinese have denied this report.
3.Except briefly, in a disastrously botched operation at Isfahan.
4.In the run-up to the war, some media outlets speculated that Russia had supplied Iran with its S-400 missile defence, but there is no evidence of that in the present conflict.
5.The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Open-Source Analysis of Iran’s Missile and UAV Capabilities and Proliferation, April 2021.
6.Agence France Presse, “Iran reveals huge underground missile base with broadcast on state TV”, October 15, 2015 and CNN, https://x.com/OutFrontCNN/status/2035148083844038812 March 21, 2026.
7.David S. Cloud, “Iran’s Underground ‘Missile Cities’ Have Become One of Its Biggest Vulnerabilities”, Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2026.
8.Institute for the Study of War, “Iran Update Special Report, April 2, 2026”. https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-april-2-2026/; https://x.com/ka_grieco/status/2036201398484824221; Kelly A. Grieco, “Don’t Count Launches: Misreading Iran’s Drone Capacity”, War on the Rocks, March 16, 2026, https://warontherocks.com/2026/03/dont-count-launches-misreading-irans-drone-capacity/
9.Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt, “Iran Is Quickly Repairing Missile Bunkers, U.S. Intelligence Says”, New York Times, April 3, 2026. A CNN examination of satellite images of 27 underground bases found that 77 per cent of the tunnel entrances had been hit by U.S.-Israeli bombing, but within 48 hours, the Iranians had begun digging to re-open them. The U.S. “
The [U.S.-Israeli] combined force has struck the Yazd Missile Base at least five times since the beginning of the war. The repeated targeting of the Yazd Missile Base, as well as other Iranian missile bases, suggests that there are entrances and exits to these bases that the combined force has not struck.” Haley Britzky, Natasha Bernard, Jim Sciutto and Tal Shalev, “Exclusive: U.S. intelligence assesses Iran maintains significant missile launching capability, sources say”,
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/02/politics/iran-missiles-us-military-strikes-trump
10.IISS, op. cit.
11.Ibid.
12.Nicholas Kulish, “In Iran War, Cheap Drones Remain Wild Card”, New York Times, March 25, 2026.
13.Dylan Butts, “Iran’s Shahed drone: How ‘the poor man’s cruise missile’ is shaping Tehran’s retaliation”, CNBC, March 5, 2026.
14.Tanner Stening and Cyrus Moulton, “As U.S.-Israel war in Iran enters fourth week, costs of conflict come into focus, experts say”, Northeastern Global News, March 23, 2026.
15.Jacob Judah, “Military briefing: The high cost of using fighters to down Iranian drones”,
Financial Times, March 23, 2026.
16.Kulish, “In Iran War”.
17.Daniel Bush, Paul Brown and Alex Murray, “Iranian strikes on bases used by U.S. caused $800m in damage, new analysis shows”, BBC, March 20, 2026.
18.Michael Cembalest, “Eye on the Market”, J.P. Morgan, April 6, 2026.
19.Judah, op. cit.
20.Daniel Bush, Paul Brown and Alex Murray, “Iranian strikes on bases used by U.S. caused $800m in damage, new analysis shows”, BBC, March 20, 2026.
21.Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely”, New York Times, March 25, 2026.
22.Chris Gordon and Stephen Losey, “Key E-3 AWACS Damaged in Iranian Attack on Saudi Air Base”, Air & Space Forces Magazine, March 28, 2026.
23.Bryce Engelland, “The Long War: How does the war with Iran end?”, Thomson Reuters Institute, March 30, 2026,
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/global-economy/iran-war-ending-scenarios/
24.Cherkaoui Roudani, “War Without a Center: Iran’s Mosaic Defense”, Modern Diplomacy, March 11, 2026, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/03/11/war-without-a-center-irans-mosaic-defense/
25.Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, Mark Weisbrot, “Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis”, Lancet, August 2025.
26.Report of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, on her visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, October 2022.
27.See U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Report on U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and The Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the War, 1994, at https://web.archive.org/web/20160627034656/http://www.gulfwarvets.com/arison/banking.htm, and numerous other documents. The U.S. Senate took up this question from the narrow perspective of its own soldiers having been exposed to these chemicals during their invasion of Iraq in 1991; nevertheless these documents bear out the facts cited above.