The USA is a mega-state with a military budget of $1-trillion. Iran is a medium-sized state with a military budget of $10-billion.
The USA/Israeli armies initiated a war of aggression. The Iranian army countered with a war of attrition, in which it stretched out the aggressor over time and space to the point of surrender. Iran, historically, acted as an heir to the anti-colonial struggles and guerrilla wars of the Global South.
Avenging the 1967 defeat of Arabs
In the 1967 war of aggression Israel militarily defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and established its air superiority in the region. It was an illegal pre-emptive strike over six days, in which all of Egypt’s military aerial assets were destroyed. About 15000 Arabs were killed.
Israel’s 60-year-old air superiority now lay in tatters.
The beginning of the War
The 40-Day War began 46 years ago, a year after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
USA/Saddam imposed the 8-year war (1980-1988) on the Revolution while it was still in its infancy. It was virtually without an army. About 20-million civilians, including Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei (R.A.) – all non-soldiers – volunteered to defend the Revolution and the new Republic. Thus, was born the Basij Volunteer Forces, which still thrive today in even larger numbers.
The birth of aerial guerrilla warfare
The Islamic Republic of Iran began developing its own theory and practice of war out of its experiences of the imposed war. It was a war between unequal sides. Saddam provided the foot soldiers and USA provided air cover and war materiel, including bombs. Forty-seven years later that homegrown theory and practice guided the Iranian army to defeat the USA army, characterised by asymmetric warfare. Uniquely, Iran showed itself as an aerial guerrilla army while being a conventional standing state army.
A measure of success
In the war the USA lost more than 44 expensive aircrafts in 40 days. In comparison, in the Iraq war the USA had lost 129 helicopters and 24 fixed-winged aircrafts in six years (2003-2009).
One of the prized kills of the war was Iran’s outsmarting the F-15 Strike Eagle (valued at $90-million) and shooting it down with the low-cost old technology of surface-to-air missile.
Weekend military adventure gone wrong
The USA initiated its war of aggression as a weekend military adventure for a quick and easy victory by killing the administrative pinnacle of leadership. Iran forced it to stay for 40 days. It converted its unequal status into asymmetrical warfare, deploying low-cost weapons (e.g., Shaheed valued at $20000-$50000). Article 51 of UN Charter permits asymmetric warfare.
Israel exposed itself by showing that it had only slow-moving UAVs in the air. Its ten Iron Dome-class AD systems, David’s Sling, and Arrow proved ineffective and unsuitable for aerial guerrilla war.
Enemy attacks
Between 28 February and 22 March, the USA, IDF, and Kurdish forces – in combination or alone – carried out innumerable airstrikes, 21 enumerated airstrikes, and innumerable explosions. The aggressors created 21 ‘incidents’ in the Hormuz Strait, to which the Iranian navy responded. It also struck an intruding vessel.
(Institute for the Study of War: March 22, 2026).
(Note: in real wartime the collection of verifiable data is made difficult by the rapid hourly developments)
Iranian retaliations of proportionality
In the same period, Iran struck the nuclear vicinity of Dimona and Arad. Iran was careful not to strike the nuclear plants in order to avoid the toxification of air, soil, water, and animal and plant life that would last for decades like the Fukushima nuclear leaks in Japan in 2011, which will take 30-40 years to remove.
It launched cluster munitions that have several submunitions with dispersal power over wider area of Israel. On 22 March Iran launched three such submunition missiles. About 100 impact sites have been imaged by satellites. Altogether, it launched about 400 ballistic missiles.
By smart means
After suffering initial losses during the sudden aggression, the Iranian Air Force resorted to its Infrared Search and Track (IRST) systems to track and use its missiles to engage and shoot down aircrafts. It was a smart means to overcome the powerful radar jamming capabilities of aircrafts, over-fitted with electronic systems.
The aerial combats exposed the lack of coordination between USA and the Arab monarchies, which proved themselves incapable at providing combat support to parental USA. The air bases in non-strategic desert plains were exposed to Iranian aerial attacks. The alleged USA air superiority failed to provide security to the monarchies. The ‘royal’ families took shelter in fellow-Arab countries.
Iran by hiding its mobile air defence systems in strategic tunnels and bunkers in rugged mountainous terrain used guerrilla tactics to ambush USA planes. Iran altered the imbalance in its favour.
Israel’s over-reliance on sophisticated technologies
Israel over-relied on its layered network of sophisticated interceptor systems – the Arrow (since 2000); Iron Dome (2011); and David’s Sling (2017). The successor was supposed to improve on its predecessor.
In 2015 the USA donated $1-billion specifically for the Iron Dome batteries, interceptors, coproduction costs, and more. Israel has ten batteries, each reportedly costing about $157-million. Each interceptor missile reportedly costs about $76000.
A single David’s Sling missile costs $1-million. A single Arrow 3 and 4 missile costs $3-million. Financially, the contest was reduced to $3-million versus $20000.
Israel having installed the expensive technologies, put blind faith in them, and became complacent about the security of its citizens. It lacked vision beyond conflict. Reality and delusion became fused or confused. War became a videogame or TV entertainment until swarms of drones and smart missiles began hitting them. Its citizens scattered into overcrowded bomb shelters reserved for only White Jews.
Lack of military zonal marking
The layered interceptor system lacks the technological capacity to intercept multiple missiles simultaneously. Like in soccer, tactical defensive zonal marking can intercept attacks by multiple attacking players, simultaneously.
Individual defender-to-forward marking does not always work. It makes the defence line porous for the unmarked attacking players to score goals.
The Israeli interceptor system is built for individual interceptor-to-missile defence.
Iran’s attack with a swarm of drones and missiles with multiple warheads, definitively, demonstrated the obsoleteness of the expensive interceptor system.
The downing of the coveted F-15E Strike Eagle
On 3 April the Iranian army downed, amongst a few other aerial vehicles, the coveted F-15E Strike Eagle. What was the real purpose of those vehicles over Isfahan’s nuclear facilities in Central Iran?
On the pretext of rescuing two pilots by a large force, the USA launched a risky ‘search-and-rescue’ mission whose real purpose was to capture Iran’s legally produced enriched uranium. Iran launched attacks by ground fire and also brought down two Black Hawk helicopters and two C-130 transport aircrafts.
Prior to the downing of the aircrafts Iran had apparently switched off its radars and allowed the USA/IDF to bomb the switched-off radars for about 35 days. Iran feigned a paralysis of its multi-layered air-defence networks. Later, on 7 April IDF boasted that it had destroyed 130 Iranian air detection systems.
Based on misinformation about the radars, USA reprogrammed the Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle (valued at $90-million) to sense that the airspace was safe for hundreds of kilometres deep inside central Iran. The F-15 is coveted because of its carrying capacity of 10000kg of precision-guided munitions. It is the backbone of the USA’s deep-strike capability. But Iran’s indigenously manufactured passive defensive systems made the USA stealth and electronic countermeasures irrelevant. They locked onto the twin-engine strike fighter while with heat-seeking surface-to-air missile (‘old-fashioned’ technology) destroyed the fighter in mid-flight. There is no technology to cool an engine in flight.
The Iranian army had rewritten in a single day the rules of engagement in aerial warfare, which entered the annals of guerrilla tactics. Iran definitively asserted its sovereignty over its airspace.
Iran’s Mosaic Defence Strategy
In the aftermath of USA invasion of Iraq in 2003 and from Iran’s experience of fighting the USA/Saddam war of 1980-1988, Iran began even as a standing conventional army to develop guerrilla tactics like little mosaics patterned on a single ceramic tile. The ‘tile’ is spread over its 31 provinces, the mountainous geography of which favoured the use of guerrilla tactics to stretch out the enemy and weary them until they collapse inwardly.
The strength of the army is not in its weapons but the ordinary citizens, including tribes in remote areas. The people view the army not as oppressors but as liberators.
The Mosaic utilizes all the characteristics of people’s war that begin with the people as the support base. The phases of a people’s war are: strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, and strategic counter-offensive, all of which are discernible in the 99 phases of Operation True Promise-4.
The organizational forms of the people’s armed forces are: people’s militia (Basij Volunteer Forces), autonomous regional troops across 31 provinces, and the main force as the standing conventional state army.
The fighting forms are: guerrilla warfare extended even to aerial warfare; mobile warfare as used by missile launchers from repurposed Toyota bakkies for surprise attacks and disappearance within a few minutes like ghosts; and positional warfare of conventional army.
While the USA erroneously focused on assassinations of individual leaders Iran concentrated on the people’s war, as conceived by its Mosaic Defensive Strategy.
Philosophically, the Mosaic may be interpreted as Prophet Moses’s law of an eye-for-an-eye.
Perennial lessons from the Chinese Revolution
The lessons were not lost to Iran’s military leaders.
In Chinese history, after the depletion of the revolutionary forces to one-tenth (800) of their original strength of 8000 soldiers in two weeks – from the start of the Autumn Harvest Uprising on 8 September 1927 – the revolutionary forces proceeded to the rural mountain fortress of Chingkangshan instead of the city of Nanchang. At the mountain fortress, they built a rural base. Among the peasantry they discovered the source of their strength, which was to sustain them in the revolutionary armed struggle that lasted for 22 years. On the basis of their physical strength, they created the social content of the Chinese Revolution, the benefits of which are for the whole world to enjoy in the 21st century.
The Iranian military leaders are schooled as scholar-soldiers in authentic military literature such as Sun Tzu’s Art of War (2500-year-old text), Miyamoto Mushashi’s The Book of Five Rings, military writings of Von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, Nguyen Van Giap (Vietnam), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea Bissau, Africa), Che Guevara (Cuba), and more.
The strategic value of the Strait of Hormuz
As the USA began losing battles, especially, after the tenth day it found assassinations futile against the hydra-headed institutional force of Iran. Its interest in uranium waned, especially, after its co-called ‘rescue mission’ of 3 April. Having started the war without strategic politico-military objectives, it suddenly shifted it attention to the Strait of Hormuz.
In terms of international law, the governance of the Strait is within the scope of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. As the width of the Strait is less than 24 nautical miles the entire sea route is not a part of international waters or an international shipping route. There is no free and compulsory passage. Iran legally has the right to selective and conditional control over vessel traffic in order to maintain its sovereignty over its waters and littoral land space. The Strait has an exclusive unquantifiable asset value for Iran, endowed by nature.
This enviable control, together with Oman, has enabled Iran to change the geopolitics and geo-economics of the global supply chain. It is further empowered to break the regional vertebrae of the spinal cord of imperialism in West Asia. All it requires now is enforcement as a gift of nature.
The Strait of Hormuz now sees the replication of military asymmetric warfare as economic asymmetric warfare.
10-Point Plan for the surrender of USA imperialism
The key point of this Plan is No.2: ‘Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz.’
Haroon Aziz as a member of the armed wing of the ANC was also a researcher on military matters and science under its Chief of Staff, Comrade Chris Hani who was assassinated in 1993.
By Haroon Aziz, South Africa
