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Iran Sanctions Cripple Ageing Military

(BBC News) Nick Childs - Iran has about the biggest armed forces in the Middle East, with more than half-a-million people in uniform, but decades of U.S.-led arms embargoes have had a huge impact on the strength of its conventional armed forces. "More and more, Iran is dependent on systems delivered at the time of the Shah...systems which are old in technology, where there are many countermeasures, which are wearing out," says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Nominally, Iran has about 300 combat aircraft, but "only about 40% to 60% of the inventory Iran has can fly, for example, out of its combat aircraft, and much less of its helicopter fleet," says Cordesman. "One of the long-term effects of arms embargoes is for countries always to become more self-sufficient, to develop their own manufacturing capability," says Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute in London. However, Cordesman says in some cases the Iranians "simply have lied about the capability of weapons systems that can't perform at anything like the level that you sometimes see reported in the press."
2010-08-03 08:44:55
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