September 06, 2019
The Pasdaran have now doubled down on their claims of massive military might, asserting that Iran is not just a regional military force but a “globally superior military power,” in the words of Pasdar commander Major General Hossein Salami.
He has asserted that Iran’s military is so invincible that no country can win a ground war against it.
As for power on the seas, where any confrontation is more likely to occur, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, commander of the Pasdaran’s maritime forces has declared: “Americans have always been the ultimate and full-scale losers in all their encounters with the Pasdar Navy, and the most notable cases of their defeats were on April 14, 1988, and January 12, 2016, before their drone was shot down on June 20.”
Fadavi was referring first to the April 1988 incident where an Iranian mine floating in the Persian Gulf badly damaged the US frigate Samuel B. Roberts. He failed to mention that the US followed that up with a retaliatory attack on Iranian oil platforms that saw huge losses by the Iranian Navy when it tried to intervene—one frigate, the Sahand, sunk (45 crew killed), one gunboat sunk (11 crew killed), three speedboats sunk, one frigate, the Sabalan, crippled, two oil platforms destroyed, and 1 F-4 Phantom fighter jet damaged. The US Navy lost one helicopter that crashed at sea, but was not shot down.
The second instance Fadavi cited was Iran’s seizure in January 2016 of two tiny American riverine boats with 10 sailors aboard when the boats strayed into Iranian waters, which was hardly a military action. It was simply a police action, with the Americans offering no resistance, so it can’t even be said that it showed anything about anyone’s military might.
The third case was the downing in June 2019 of a MQ-4C Triton drone by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile. The drone was unarmed, so, again, this showed nothing about combat capability.
Fadavi, however, said: “All failures and defeats of the US forces in the Persian Gulf are illustrative of the Americans’ desperation, frustration, and agony in the face of the Iranian nation in the past 40 years.”
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Mehdi Rabbani, deputy chief of the Joint Staff of the Iranian armed forces, says Iran is unbeatable on the ground. “For at least the next 10 years, no regional or trans-regional country is able to counter or fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran in ground warfare,” he said recently.
He claimed, “Iran did not lose any of its territory during the Iraqi-imposed war in the 1980s when the army of Saddam Hussein was backed by dozens of world states and powers.”
Iran spent eight years trying to defeat Saddam and overrun Iraq but had to accept a ceasefire when the Iraqi Army handed the Islamic Republic’s forces one defeat after another in the spring of 1988. By contrast, the US military eliminated the Iraqi military in 41 days of combat in 2003.
The Iranian military regularly claims that its forces are much stronger today than when they “won” the Iran-Iraq War on the 1980s. It is almost certainly true that they are stronger today. But that does not equate to global superiority—and the examples the military used to try to convince the Iranian people of its might against the United States are anything but convincing.
