I’m an “elite” chess player. :)
Don’t know how to play well at all but as long as I’m playing against a child who’s not a prodigy, no one can prove I’m NOT elite.
Put them up against US Marines to answer the question once and for all.
I remember reading in early 1991 that Iraq had the 4th biggest army in the world. How did that work out? :)
In a straight up fight against a equivalent U.S. Army or Marine force, the IRGC would lose, eventually. Individual IRGC troops are decently trained, and as tactically skilled as anyone else. But they resemble the WWII Japanese in that they lack effective armor, airpower, and mobile artillery.
In the offense, This would lead them to fanatically die in large numbers, but in the defense, they can and will make you bleed and use lots of artillery and air-strikes to root them out and kill them.
They trained the Iraqis who rocketed and mortared me across eastern Iraq during my last two deployments. They are fiendishly inventive in the use of IEDs, rockets, and mortars. However above the small unit level, their leadership is uneven, with some very good leaders, but also some politically reliable hacks as well. They took significant casualties (higher than they should have) in Syria against the various insurgents there.