Introducing "The Iran Reckoning with Afshon Ostovar"
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Welcome to the Iran Reckoning, a new members-only podcast from War on the Rocks. I'm Ryan Evans, the founder of War on the Rocks, and in this exclusive new show, renowned Iran scholar Afshan Ostavar takes you deep inside one of the world's most complex and consequential geopolitical flashpoints. From covert operations to regional power struggles to repression and nuclear risk, the Iran Reckoning explores how Tehran navigates war, peace, and everything in between.

Afshan is the author of two important books on Iran, The Vanguard of the Imam, Religion, Politics, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and his most recent book, Wars of Ambition, the United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East. Join Afshan as he and his expert friends that he'll have on the show bring unparalleled analysis, insider perspectives, and candid discussions to illuminate the forces driving Iranian actions and reactions in today's contested world. This first episode is free for all.

But to listen to future episodes of this show, you will have to become a War on the Rocks member. Join our membership community at warontherocks.com slash membership. This is the Iran Reckoning.

Afshan, how did you get started studying and looking at Iran? That's a good question. You want to hear the whole biography? I'll say it this way. When I came out of high school, I was not ready for college. I did a quarter of college and realized that I didn't want to take out a bunch of loans to study something that I wasn't sure about.

So I took a year off and worked, and then I went and traveled around the Middle East and Central Asia for two years, volunteering, teaching English and doing things like that. And sort of by the very end, I spent a very long summer in Tajikistan. I was frankly trying to get as close to Iran as I could. What year was this? I don't want to date myself. Let's

Let's say it was a while ago. Yeah, anyway, I was trying to get to Persian-speaking lands. Anyway, so I end up in Tajikistan. And Tajikistan was a pretty rough place at the time. There was a curfew. There was a lot of shootings and bombings and things like that. And I realized I was kind of over my head in terms of

my travel experience, but it was pretty cool. In a lot of ways, got to know a lot of interesting people. One thing that was fascinating to me was that there was this whole side of the world that I was totally unfamiliar with. You had Islamists, you had militias, you had narcotics traffickers, you had a Russian imperial presence, you had all sorts of criminality and ideology, and all of these things were kind of interesting. You also had an Iranian bookstore called Al-Khoda, which was a front for Iranian intelligence,

which was kind of an interesting place to go into. Anyway, so I was young. I didn't study any of this stuff. So all of this was just kind of new to me. And so when I came back to school, I really wanted to understand that stuff. I wanted to understand ideology. I wanted to understand Islamic militancy. I wanted to understand civil war. I wanted to understand conflict. And so that's what I started to pursue. And I moved from Central Asia to the Middle East,

in terms of my interests, and over time, I ended up sort of focusing more on Iran than anything else. And by the time it came to my PhD and my dissertation, it was kind of a fluke. I had started my PhD as a medievalist, but when it came to writing my dissertation, I didn't want to write anything that was that old because I realized that for my own personal interests,

there was not a lot of utility in it. Everybody wanted to know about the wars that were going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's what I sort of valued teaching. And so it just so happened that when I was looking for a topic, two of my professors independently just said, well, why don't you write on the IRGC? Nobody's written a book on them yet.

And I was like, well, okay. So that ended up defining my career, but it was just sort of a fluke. I could have written on any number of things. My career could have gone a different way, but I just happened to write on the IRGC and everything else is history. And you also have some family history in Iran. How has that shaped the way you approach the country? Sure. Yeah. No, there was a personal relationship too. I mean, that's the ironic thing, right? Is I really just, in doing this, I really just wanted a relationship with Iran in some

way that I hadn't had. And I ended up having a very, very different relationship than I anticipated having. When did your family leave your own? They left before the revolution. So they willingly left.

Well, I guess it's good to leave before rather than during or after. So after you finished your studies, you ended up working at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point with some friends of ours, Will McCants, Brian Fishman and others. How did you end up there? That was all Will McCants that hooked me up with that job. Will and I were old friends and were studying similar things. And he was a few years ahead of me in grad school.

And we both really wanted to understand sort of what was going on after 9/11. I mean, I think it's difficult for people to understand now, but before 9/11, I mean, there was a couple people that had written about sort of Islamic militancy.

and what we call sort of Salafi jihadism now. But those weren't terms that people used. I mean, all of my classes on Islam, all of my classes about any of that were about Sufism. Nobody was studying jihadism. And frankly, my professors didn't know what it was. It was not a stain on them. It was just, it was just a really, really niche sort of thing. So Will and I both had an interest in learning it. He was ahead of me, and he ended up getting hooked up with the CTC.

His work was also from a much earlier period in history, too. It's interesting. It's sort of two medievalists. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we were doing really early stuff. So I had written some paper on sort of symbolism and

random stuff and ended up working with them on this small, in hindsight, very embarrassing project, but then got hooked up with them to sort of put together some distance learning courses and stuff. And it was a lot of fun. I mean, the cool thing about the CTC at the time was that it was like a startup. And I mean, the war on terror was kind of like a startup too. So you were kind of inventing things as you went along and just about anything you could ride on was new at the time. And so there was a lot of excitement and a lot of potential. And

And that was really an exciting time to be working there because there were a lot of document releases that the U.S. government made through CTC there on like jihadist documents that were seized from the battlefield and other things. And so very exciting time. But how did you continue to hone in on Iran while you were working at this place that was predominantly focused on Sunni terrorism? My focus at the time was...

I was still doing medievalist stuff, but sort of moving more into this modern direction. And I very easily could have ended up writing on sort of Sunni radicalism or Salafi jihadism. I had a few different topics that I was looking at. When I was in grad school, I was the cultural historian that focused on religion. So I wasn't doing security, I wasn't doing foreign policy, I wasn't doing geopolitics. I was coming at it from a very different direction.

I was much more interested in ideology.

So I had a few different topics, but I kind of wanted to stay in the Shia world. I was interested in Shiaism and interested in sort of the larger sort of questions around Shiaism. So that's why I ended up staying with Iran. It also sort of helped that I had people like Will and others that were already pretty advanced on the Salafi jihadi side. So in terms of the CTC and where I saw myself going, like it was also a way to sort of be a little different and provide a different skill set.

And this, of course, was also during the war in Iraq, which implicated Iran in major ways. Iran, of course, was supplying and supporting various Shia groups, but also, which is still poorly understood today, also supplying Sunni jihadist groups with explosively formed penetrators. It's an acronym I haven't had to use in a while. These sort of shaped charges that were meant to sort of

explode and burrow up armored vehicles, which was a huge problem for our forces back then. And Iran was really behind a lot of this. So how were you able to leverage that in support of the analysis that was going on to support what we were trying to accomplish at the time? To be honest, that was a really difficult topic because, I mean, the thing that was really spiking at the time, right, was sectarianism. And so sectarianism was sort of the angle that I connected with the most in

because I saw it sort of having really profound effects at the time. I mean, even at like the University of Michigan, within the student body, it was having sort of ramifications.

Southeastern Michigan has large Muslim communities of both Sunni and Shia sects. And it was starting to divide those communities too. So that was the issue that was resonating the most with me, that Iran's support to proxies and even to Sunni jihadists in Iraq was a really poorly understood issue at the time. And it also suffered from yellow cake syndrome in the sense that the Bush administration had, because of the

the pretext for the war in Iraq, had really lost

For the younger listeners who may not know that term, he's referencing yellow cake uranium. He's not referencing actual cake. Yeah, this is about WMD in Iraq. So the Bush administration lost a lot of trust with the American people, but also with serious sort of intellectuals and academics. And so even though the military was talking about and briefing reporters on Iran's support to these groups, there wasn't a lot of trust in what was happening. And frankly, I was a young grad student.

I didn't really know what to believe either. So there was also a sense in this really peak in 2007 that the Bush administration was sort of itching for war with Iran. And so there was a lot of books that came out around 2007 and articles and whatever about, you know, the Bush administration's plans for war. So there was a hesitancy, I think, in

parts of the commentaria and academia to put much credence into the reports of Iran's support to Iraqi groups.

So this is a way of saying it wasn't an issue that I focused on. It wasn't an issue that I could really investigate. And frankly, the reporting on it wasn't very good. It wasn't getting a ton of traction in the reporting. The first thing that came out about it was actually written by the CTC. It was by Joe Felter and Brian Fishman. And actually, I wrote chunks of it, too, but I'm an unnamed contributor to it.

And the reason I'm an unnamed contributor to it is because I asked them not to put my name on it because it was coming out in election year and they were writing it literally in a skiff in Iraq

and just sending me documents to sort of analyze and ask me to write sections. And I didn't know what their conclusions were gonna be. I was a little nervous, you know, that it could be some sort of hot potato when it came out. And so I asked not to be on it. In hindsight, you know, it was a totally fine, a very good rapport. I would've been happy to have my name on it, but I was playing it safe. But I really didn't write about that issue. I mean, even in my first book, "Vanguard of the Imam," there wasn't a lot of sources on it. So I only just touched on it briefly in that book.

It's not 'til my last book, which just came out last year, Wars of Ambition, that I put a lot of energy and a lot of research into Iran's support for Iraqi groups during that war.

I'm pretty sure it's the most detailed and definitive thing on it now. But yeah, I mean, it took me a decade or so to sort of get around to actually sort of investigate that issue. So even though it was really important, it wasn't an issue that defined how I looked at Iran at the time. So you worked for a few years at the Center for Naval Analyses, also where Will moved as well. And now you're at the Naval Postgraduate School. As you mentioned, you've come out with these two books.

What I like about you as a thinker on Iran is I actually never really know what you're going to say. And that's good because sometimes there's a lot of thinkers out there, especially on this issue, where you've read the news and you see that they've come out with a piece and you know exactly what it's going to say before you've even read it. And I think that that is not a very interesting place to be intellectually.

Whereas you are not easy to pin down ideologically in terms of analytical bias. You know, you really are an unpredictable and creative thinker in that respect.

The Iran analytical community is very kind of politically divided and often kind of toxic. And there's a lot of circular firing squads going on and things like that. Why do you think this issue is so... In a world full of suffering, horror, war, why do you think that this issue invites such a almost recriminatory analytical community? I think it's for a couple of reasons. It's kind of funny because I always...

Sometimes I always regret not doing Salafi jihadism as my focus because I feel like nobody likes ISIS, nobody likes Al-Qaeda. You're never getting into these sort of

arguments about sort of the virtues of terrorist groups. I mean, there's maybe some fringe arguments there, but it's a pretty easy thing to just sort of get away with without knowing that you're going to anger sort of a whole section of people. But you really can't say anything about Iran. I think that's especially like if you're doing on social media or anything, that's not going to trigger a tsunami of anger from

from some sector of the internet, you know, and sometimes it's just bought armies and sometimes it's real individuals. But to answer your question, I think it's two reasons. One, Iran is still a niche topic, even though Iran, I think, is one of the most interesting and important countries in the world in terms of geopolitics. It is still pretty niche. It's niche even in the Middle East. You know, I mean, the way that Middle East studies works, the way the area studies work is that

It's defined by language. And in most Middle East studies, people are Arabists. And so Arabists don't really consider Iran and Turkey as part of the Middle East. Or if they do, they're marginal.

and they don't really like to talk about them, you know, but they feel comfortable talking about Mali or Sudan or Iraq, no matter what their sort of real expertise is, right? And if you specialize on Iran, you tend to really just specialize on Iran. You don't specialize on Iraq and Afghanistan or something like that. So one reason is that it's niche intellectually in terms of sort of the community that tends to write about it. But the other thing is that

people who write about Iran tend to be dominated by two groups. And it's not exclusive to this, but there are two groups that tend to really dominate commentary on Iran and writing about Iran, especially when it comes to sort of Iran as a security issue or a geopolitical issue. When it comes to other things, it's a little more mixed. But you have the Iranian diaspora and Iranians themselves who write on Iran. And they, of course, have a personal stake in the issue. They care about Iran. They have family in Iran. Iran means something to them.

So it's whatever they say about Iran, whether they like the regime or don't like the regime, there's an emotional basis for how they come to the topic, right? And the other side of this is people who write about Israel and care about Israel's security. And they, of course, also have an emotional stake in this. They care about Israel and they see Iran as a threat or the Islamic Republic of Iran as a threat.

And so they come at it from that position, right? And those two communities sometimes overlap and sometimes they're different. But even within those communities, you have divides, right? So you have divides within the diaspora. You have divides within sort of the Iranians who still live in Iran.

about what they want the future of Iran to be like or how to exert change in Iran, right? So some people want to change. I don't think there's just about anybody commenting on Iran for the most part that wants to preserve the Islamic Republic. I mean, you have the Islamic Republic and its propagandists themselves that do, but most people don't see the regime as a great thing for Iran.

But the way to change Iran is there is no sort of unified position on that, right? So some people want to change Iran by being hawkish and holding the regime to account and pressing for more forceful U.S. foreign policy towards Iran or sanctions or even conflict. And other people see it better that

A better way would be if the Islamic Republic just was able to, or if the United States was just able to mend bridges with the Islamic Republic, right? And coax sort of the goodness out of the Islamic Republic out, right? So I always talk about that view of Iran as sort of the Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader,

sort of paradigm, right? Where the regime might look like Darth Vader, but there's people that treat it like Anakin's still in there. You just need to find a way to sort of coax him out. And someday, you know, he'll be there with Yoda and Obi-Wan and everything will be great, you know? And so, because, you know, it's basically like the war and peace crowd, right? Or the sanctions and peace divide. And so within that, you have a lot of passionate disagreements

And, you know, I think everybody, because it's emotional, that the stakes feel really high and the disagreements, I think, become much more personal and biting than maybe they should be. So we're doing this show with you for War on the Rocks members. What do you hope to accomplish with this show? I think it's a really interesting time to do it, because from my perspective, Iran, if we step back,

A year ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran is at the apex of its regional power. It's strong at home. It has a ton of influence in Lebanon. It runs the geography in Syria. It's able to sort of forward deploy missiles to Yemen after October 7th, which is a huge sort of moment for the Islamic Republic and one that the Islamic Republic

celebrates as its own achievement, even if they sort of officially say we had nothing to do with it. For them, it's sort of this culmination of everything they've been working towards. All the support that they've flowed into Gaza over the years finally sort of broke the dam and was able to sort of do damage to the state of Israel.

And then once you get after October 7th, you have this regional unified front against Israel. You have rockets flying from Lebanon. You have drones flying from Iraq. You have missiles flying from Yemen. All of it is a showcase of Iran's immense regional clout and the fact that they've been able to unify, you know, these diverse sort of polities against Israel.

Fast forward to today, the landscape looks drastically different, you know, and it's all changed in nine months' time. The groups in Gaza no longer really exist.

in any sort of military capacity. Hezbollah has been eviscerated. Syria is no longer accessible to Iran in any overt way. The Houthis in Yemen are still sort of kicking around. And then Iran, of course, has been sort of on the losing end of a pretty severe war with Israel. Its air defenses are gone. Its missiles are depleted. Its nuclear enrichment program, which it used as a deterrent, is either set back or

months, years, or maybe effectively done. So you have this immense retrenchment within Iran, but you have a regime that has survived all of this, right? And the ramifications of this

are gonna be, I think, profound, and they're gonna play out in the weeks and months and even years forward. And it's not just going to create change in Iran, but it's gonna create change in Lebanon, in Syria, we've already seen what's going on. Iraq is also going to be affected by this, Yemen. Not to mention Iran's relationships with Russia and China

There's any way that this can go. Iran can get weaker and more isolated. It can become more nationalistic and build up a more conventional military. It can try to do the same thing all over again. It can reform and change or collapse. More conflict can still happen again, right, if the Israelis or the Americans feel that not enough damage was done to those cities.

or if Iran tries to restart its program again, you could have more bombings and more missile responses from Iran. So I think we're at an inflection point and things are gonna really start to change, not just for Iran, but for the region going forward. And so I think it's a really, really interesting time to start covering this issue in more regularity and more detail than maybe we've done in the past. - If you go back a year, when Iran seemed like this, they were at the top of their game almost.

Then things started unraveling towards the late summer and especially in the fall with the attacks on Hezbollah and the Pajar and Waki Taki attacks. What a brilliant display of Israeli tactical acumen and penetration. If you were sitting in Tehran last summer,

What were the signs that they missed that things were maybe about to go south or decisions that they made that in retrospect were pretty poor decisions for them? Well, I think they've made a lot of poor decisions. I think October 7th, whether they had anything to do with it or not, was a really poor decision. But I think the poorest decision that the regime made was believing that this house of cards that it had built across the

the region was going to be something that could sustain an actual war, right? What made the Islamic Republic strong was that it kept the war outside of its borders, right? Nobody attacked Iran. Remember when Qasem Soleimani was assassinated. Okay, that's an attack on Iran, but that's an attack on Iran in Iraq. Iran responds with the

Biggest ballistic missile attack in history against U.S. forces, right? The U.S., surprisingly, doesn't respond to that. After that point, if you read sort of, you know, the interviews with Iran's commanders, some of which are now dead, I think they learned the wrong lesson there. The lesson they learned was they were untouchable.

and that the United States wanted no part of war with Iran. And so they kept their foot on the gas and they kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And ultimately, somebody was going to check their advance. Somebody was going to respond, right? And if you read my book, Wars of Ambition, that's what it's about. Wars of Ambition is about the history of 9-11 to October 7th and about the

Iran's rise, but also the different approaches that the United States and Iran had towards creating a new order in the Middle East, right? These two very different ideas of what the Middle East should be. One of the main arguments in that book was that all of this is going to boil over. All of this is going to head towards conflict, and conflict is going to come to Iran one way or another. And if that happens, everything that Iran sort of had built is going to be tested.

And in this world we have like pessimists and optimists, right? And pessimists might look at the world and see all the things that could go wrong, and optimists might see all the things that could be done, right? The tech sector's all optimists and intellectuals are all pessimists. But I don't think there's been any regime in history, any government in history that has been more optimistic, more unchecked optimism in their politics than the Islamic Republic of Iran. I mean, these guys absolutely have believed

That what they were doing was not just correct, but genius, and that they were winning on every front. And to their credit, they really, really were able to extract a lot of geopolitical advancement out of very little in terms of resources. They established almost very strong deterrence for years, but it turned out there wasn't a lot behind it when the balloon went up.

Right. I mean, you know, if you looked at all of their proxies, right? I mean, it's one thing to sort of think of Iran as like a risk board and see, okay, it controls Syria, controls Lebanon, it controls Iraq. But when you looked at like who controlled those countries and who controlled Iran's presence in those countries, you're really just talking about extractive militias. You're not talking about good governments. You're not talking about strong states. You're just talking about basically mafias with bigger weapons.

And those guys have no idea how to run anything. They just know how to kill. They know how to coerce. But they don't know how to build anything stable. And if you look at the IRGC's influence, anywhere the IRGC has influenced, those are the guys that get to the top. So to my mind, there was nothing ever stable.

solid about what Iran had built, but it was never clear to me how it could be toppled over. I didn't imagine, for example, that walkie-talkies, impagers, and a few dozen very well-placed penetrating bunker busters would be enough to eviscerate

Hezbollah. Hezbollah was by far the most formidable of all these groups, right? And I certainly didn't think that a little charge out of Idlib with maybe some Turkish ISR support would be enough to collapse the Syrian state and drive Iran out, you know? I mean, these are the things that you cannot know from the outside and cannot predict, right? But it just shows how hollow Iran's sort of system of regional influence was, right?

But they also had missiles, right? And those missiles were powerful and accurate and sophisticated until they used them, right? And then when they used them against Israel, the Israelis realized, well, hey, we can bear the consequences of these actions.

Yeah, with a lot of US and UK and other help to intercept most of them. Absolutely. But that's the reality. I mean, Iran knows that when it's fighting Israel, it's not just fighting Israel, it's fighting the United States and all of the US partners and allies. And so once Iran sort of uses those weapons, those weapons are no longer an abstract threat. They're a known threat.

And once Israel realized that it could deal with that threat with U.S. support, then that deterrent was lost too. I mean, the only deterrent they had left was the nuclear enrichment program, which is why they were holding on to it tooth and nail.

But that's gone too now. Well, we don't know. We don't know. I mean, Jeffrey Lewis had an interesting assessment. I don't know if you saw this on Twitter. There's a lot of reason to think that they've held on to quite a bit combined with the DIA leaked battle damage assessment, if we're to believe it. Yeah, I did see it. But my view is that even if they preserve something underground, right, even if they have their stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, Iran is so thoroughly penetrated by Israeli intelligence.

The idea that they could restart that program in secret and either move for a nuclear breakout or just try to get their program up and running again without the Israelis knowing and without the Israelis taking action, to me, would be really unlikely, right? So my view is that there's extreme risk for them to try to recreate any of this. And because they've got no air defenses, it's going to take a long time for them to sort of

put together a new sort of system of air defenses, they're going to be really vulnerable to outside military pressure. So it may not be done. But to me, it's probably effectively gone as a deterrent, at least for a long time. I think you're right. It just depends on the US staying involved. I think if you look at where Israel was able to strike,

They were not able to strike in the southeast of Iran. That wasn't a choice. I think that was sort of them maxing out their capabilities. I mean, what Israel accomplished was undoubtedly impressive in the attack, but there are some limits and it relies on the U.S. staying involved as being willing to launch more strikes, which I'm not sure that's where we're at.

I'm a little wary of discounting the nuclear threat at this stage, even in the sort of months. I mean, if you're Iran and you can build a nuke right now, you're going to do it, is my opinion. You could, but then what's the payoff? You know, it's not clear that it would be a deterrent. It could just trigger a bigger conflict. You know, a bigger conflict where bunker busters hit nuclear weapons. As we've seen with Iran and as we've seen with Russia, like...

One of the things about our adversaries is they never run out of bad ideas and stupid strategies that are bad for the region and often bad for us, but ultimately very bad for themselves. That's absolutely true. That's

That's absolutely true. What's your interpretation of where we are now in terms of there is some sort of an extremely unstable ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Trump has been very insistent that Israel and Iran both abide by it. We're supposed to be going back to talks. It seems that the political logic behind Israel's strike, and they weren't very subtle about it, especially in naming the Operation Rising Lion, which is this motif from the pre-revolutionary Iran.

that they want regime change. How stable do you think the Iranian state is right now? The way I've been explaining it is that Israel, with the United States' help, did a really, really impressive job of breaking Iran's ability to be a formidable military power outside of Iran's borders, right? Both by going to war against the proxies, but also

By reducing its capacity to make missiles, perhaps expending its extensive supply of missiles and eradicating its air defense, Iran doesn't really have deterrence left and it can't easily challenge, I think, the U.S. or Israel from a standoff position.

But neither the Israeli strikes or the U.S. strikes did anything to weaken the regime inside Iran. That is to say, the regime's ability to sort of wage violence and monopolize violence inside Iran. I mean, there was a few Basij checkpoints that were hit. I think there was a few police stations that were hit, but that's not going to do much, right? So the Islamic Republic, its first order of business is going to be securing the regime. And securing the regime, I think, is going to sadly involve

a wave of repression against the Iranian people that is probably going to be very severe. And maybe last weeks, maybe last months, maybe last years. But I don't see the regime as weakened inside, right? I mean, the regime is still, they're the ones with the guns. They're the ones with the control over the telecommunications. They control electricity. They control just about everything in the country. So there are scenarios where, you know, if you get

20 million people to rise up, leave their apartment buildings and try to take over police headquarters and army barracks and all this kind of stuff. Sure, you could have another Iranian revolution, but I don't see the regime as really weakened at all and is probably much more nervous about

their perceived weakness vis-a-vis the Iranian people than they were. And so I think they're going to try to remind the Iranian people of who's in charge and perhaps be a lot more draconian about it than they had been. Can you tell us about the relationship and how you think maybe it's evolved and how we should think about it in the present between Iran's conventional armed services and the IRGC? Historically, there was some divide, but these days, they're very similar institutions.

They're similar in the sense that their top command is all appointed by the Supreme Leader or by appointees of the Supreme Leader. And they're all appointed based primarily on political and ideological loyalty to the Supreme Leader and to the regime, right? So the top command and sort of the up-and-coming officers are all cut from the same cloth as the IRGC. So politically, they're very similar. But

But institutionally, they're very different. They have different institutional cultures. They have very different purviews in the country. The regular military, known as the artesh,

or sometimes people just call it the army, is primarily just involved in territorial defense. So they have the biggest infantry. They run all of Iran's conventional platforms. So they run Iran's Blue Water Navy, all the big frigates and things like that that it uses to sort of do port visits in Sri Lanka or wherever else. They have Iran's subs. They flew Iran's most advanced aircraft, which I think Israel

mostly destroyed the F-14s and F-4s and F-5s. So they had sort of kind of the main air force, but it was not a very useful air force for Iran. And they have a different sort of regional division. So they control the coastline in the Caspian, they control the Gulf of Oman. The IRGC owns Iran's missile and drone program. It owns Iran's Gold's force, which is its sort of external

kind of a special forces slash CIA kind of organization. They also control the IRGC Navy controls the Persian Gulf up till the Strait of Hormuz. So it's their small boats and their mine layers and things like that that are tasked with operating in that area in contingencies or even in regular periods. But the main thing that differentiates the IRGC besides its sort of cultural difference, it's a more flat organization culturally.

It's more fraternal. The stratification is less severe, whereas in the regular military, it's kind of a more classic military where rank really matters and decorum really matters. In the IRGC, it's a little looser. But where the IRGC really differs is that, as its name implies...

It's the guardian of the Islamic revolution, not of Iran. So it safeguards what it considers to be the Iranian revolution, which is to mean Iran's theocratic system and everything that that system stands on. So the IUC gets involved in all sorts of things, intelligence, culture work, propaganda, telecommunications, political work.

it basically has infiltrated, or not, permeated rather, just about every sector of the Iranian government and society because it views its role as guarding

guarding the revolution, guarding Iran's governing system, not just the territorial integrity of the country. So that's kind of the big difference. That's what makes the IRGC so profoundly influential within Iran is because it doesn't just have a military role. It's really the regime. I mean, if we talk about the regime, the way that I use that term is to mean the unelected powers

sectors in Iran. We're really just talking about the Supreme Leader and his office and the IRGC. Those are the two primary components of the Islamic Republic. And Israel wiped out their top echelon of leadership, basically, in the IRGC. How deep is their bench for senior leadership? How quickly can we expect them to recover and function effectively? Well, I mean, theoretically, it's deep. The problem is we don't really know a lot about Iran's

mid-career officers. We don't know anything about 06s and below in Iran. Those are the field operatives for the most part. Those are the program managers. Those are the guys that really are kind of running the day-to-day

But they're not the politicos. They're not the guys who sort of interface with the supreme leader, with the supreme leader's appointees. But we don't know anything about those guys. Those guys don't get known until they get promoted to one star. And when they get promoted to one star, that's when sort of biographies get written about them. You know, they become the head of a think tank or the head of a provincial command or things like that. And they start to sort of build up a public identity.

So we don't know much about them. But the way that I've been sort of describing it is the guys that have been sort of killed, some of them are really important in their programs. You know, like General Haji Zadeh, who was the head of the missile program, the drone program, the Aerospace Force, was really, I think, the second most important commander within the IRGC and perhaps the most important sort of division chief. So I think his loss would be significant because he had built up...

a really impressive persona within the Islamic Republic. He had a lot of charisma, so I think replacing him will be difficult. For the other guys, I think it's a little less difficult. They were just kind of older guys who had been, hadn't seen the field in a long time.

So I think the broad strokes of the jobs will be easily replaced by whoever sort of replaces them. And a lot of them already have replacements. Most of them, it's their deputies, but others, it's people of a similar age and experience. What will change is the top command's relationship with the Supreme Leader and with the Supreme National Security Council. Because

Because a lot of these people have been in their positions, like General Salami, the head of the IRGC, they've been in their positions for a long time. And so they know how to interface with the Supreme National Security Council. They have a relationship with the Supreme Leader. They have that trust. They have that confidence. They know how to sort of

work within the system. They know how to get what they want. That, I think, is what's going to change. You're going to have people taking on new billets. It's going to take them a while to figure out exactly where their place is. They're not just doing it as a one-off. It's a whole sort of

Top echelon, as you say, that's being replaced at the same time. So it's not just them getting to know their billets, but it's also everybody getting to know how to work with everybody else. I think that will certainly loosen the effectiveness of command and control for a little bit, at least.

I'll close with this question. We're at this sort of delicate moment again, where there's this ceasefire and we'll see if there's some productive talks. What are some of the indicators you're looking for as to what happens next from Iran? Well, there's a few things. I mean, Iranian rhetoric matters. So what they say matters, but it's not always, I think, the best indicator of what they're going to do.

So the fact that they're doubling down on enrichment and the right to enrich and all that kind of stuff now, I don't know how meaningful that will be in weeks and months to come, but it could be indicative of where they want to end up. I think their threats about ending their relationship with the IAEA or pulling out of the NPT is significant. The nonproliferation treaty. Yeah, I think that's significant because if they do that, that could force

Israel's hand again, or it could prompt Israel to want to act. But it could also set the stage for them to aim for nuclear breakout if they get the opportunity. I think their relationship with China in particular is going to be really interesting. Because if anybody can resupply Iran, it's going to be China. I think there's much less with Russia in terms of what Russia can give Iran at the time, mostly because it's just so depleted itself.

because of the war in Ukraine and hasn't made good on the Su-35s that Iran already bought. They still haven't been delivered. So if Iran gets a little more...

ability to sell its oil and gas to China if it can sort of start to improve its economy a little bit. I think weapon sales and conventional military support from China is something that would be interesting, particularly because China, I think, was much more critical of Israel's war against Iran than even Russia was.

So there might be something in it for China that China didn't see before. So to me, that's something interesting. There's endless sort of domestic indicators. I'm, of course, worried about repression taking off in Iran. But repression can cut both ways, right? It can secure the regime, but it could also provoke the populace. And that's another thing that would be interesting to see. And finally, I think...

Where the United States goes from here in its sort of policy with Iran will be interesting because it's unclear to me how much appetite there is in the White House to sort of do this all over again. There might be a lot, there might be a little, there might be none. And so if the administration sort of adopts a policy that sort of

wants to force Iran into a nuclear deal that formally ends its enrichment and brings inspectors to come in and dismantle whatever's left and give up its stockpile and all those things. If that's going to be where we head next, I think it might be a really

bumpy road. And Iran might not want to give up the one thing it has left. Because I think overall, I've said this a number of times, so it might be getting tiring for people, but Iran has no deterrence left, right? It really only has maybe a stockpile of uranium and maybe some centrifuges that still work or can be repaired or whatever, maybe some secret sites that can be brought online. But

It's profoundly weaker than it was. And I don't think Iran wants to be any weaker or give up any more leverage. And I think that's going to be a really interesting and perhaps fraught standpoint for which Iran to have going forward. Well, I'm really looking forward to hearing you and your fellow experts talk on this members-only show for War on the Rock. So thanks so much, Afshan. We'll hear more from you soon. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me put together. I think it'll be fun.

Thank you so much for listening to this first episode of The Iran Reckoning. You can listen to every show that we publish in this series, as well as all of our other members-only podcasts and read our members-only newsletters and use our members-only app by becoming a member at warontherocks.com/membership. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and stay healthy.