Free Republic

Speaking in an interview with the Farsi News Agency (FNA), Deputy Lieutenant Commander of Army's Air Force for Operations General Majid Pirhadi underlined that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will cover all the country's border regions in the near future. "We are seeking to equip all the country's central air bases with long-range Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) but for now equipping bases along borders sets a priority," Pirhadi said. The commander highlighted the growing applications of UAVs in Iran's armed forces, and announced that the Air Force command headquarters plans to form a command-and-control centre for UAVs. "Utilisation of the UAVs...

Iran was said to have encountered difficulties in modernizing its Air Force. The U.S. intelligence community has determined that the Iranian Air Force was hampered in several areas of modernization of its 1970s-era U.S.-origin platforms. The Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that the Air Force was blocked in such areas as airborne early-warning and control as well as precision-guided munitions. "The IRIAF [Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force] remains largely dependent on 1970's-era U.S. aircraft like the F-4 Phantom II, the F-14A Tomcat, and the F-5E Tiger II," DIA said in a report titled "Iran's Military Power." The report, released to...

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is expected to begin air, land and sea exercises in the Persian Gulf, perhaps as soon as Thursday, according to Iran's IRIB news agency. A U.S. military official separately confirmed to CNN that the United States has observed in recent days Iran is "relocating surface and air assets" for what appears to be a major exercise. The official did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. The exercise could last five days, according to Iranian media reports. Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guard, is quoted in...

An Iranian Air Force commander announced here on Tuesday that the country overhauls and optimizes different types of military aircraft, mentioning that Air Force has even installed Iran-made radar systems on the sophisticated F14 fighter jets. "Indeed, it can be said that most airplanes have the previous designs but all of their components, including systems and parts, are being optimized and upgraded on a continued and regular basis," Iranian Air Force Lieutenant Commander for Coordination General Aziz Nasirzadeh said in an interview with FNA on Tuesday. The commander stated that mounting optimized home-made 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) smart bombs, Qassed (Messenger), on...

SNIPPET: "A senior Iranian military commander today announced that the Iranian Army is due to test-fire an optimized version of the country's 2,000-pound smart bomb, the Qassed (Messenger), in the near future. Iranian Air Force Commander Brig.-Gen. Hassan Shahsafi told the Fars news agency that early samples of the new version, called Qassed 2, will be tested in the near future." SNIPPET: "He also said that Qassed 1 has already been mass-produced and delivered to the Iranian Air Force."

The commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East made an observation that the Gulf Arab nations wished he hadn't. General David Petraeus noted that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Air Force, and it's 80 F-16E fighters could probably quickly destroy the entire Iranian Air Force. The Gulf Arabs would prefer the Iranians to believe their own propaganda, that the Iranian military is much more powerful than it actually is. The Iranian Air Force is mainly a mighty force only in terms of Iranian propaganda. The Gulf Arabs don't want the Iranians to make a strong effort to upgrade their...

Arab states, particularly in the Gulf, are seeking to build up their air power and missile defenses to counter any challenger from Iran. Mostly they're looking to their traditional arms suppliers in the West, the United States, Britain and France, but Russia is pushing hard for a piece of the action. This year's biennial Dubai air show, which opened Sunday in the United Arab Emirates, provided a showcase for the latest technology on offer. Air power has been the deciding factor in most Middle Eastern conflicts since the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, when Israeli warplanes annihilated the air forces of Egypt,...