WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND...:

 A more accurate assessment of why the Iranian government behaves as it does could lead U.S. policymakers to devise a different and less hostile policy than our government has had for the last 40 years.

That is why Gawdat Bahgat and Anoushiravan Ehteshami's new study, Defending Iran: From Revolutionary Guards to Ballistic Missiles, is such an important contribution to our understanding of Iranian security policies. Through their extensive research into Iranian military capabilities and defense doctrine, Bahgat and Ehteshami explain how and why the post-revolutionary government developed the policies that it still pursues now. They detail how the Iranian government learned from the experience of isolation during the war with Iraq and began building up its own indigenous military-industrial complex, and they stress the importance of the experience of the war in shaping their leaders' thinking about the need for an effective defense against foreign attack. 

The U.S. looms large in this thinking as the main threat to be deterred, and to that end Iran has invested heavily in building up its missile arsenal to make sure that they do not suffer the same vulnerability to attack that they endured in the 1980s. Because Iran cannot match the conventional strength of its adversaries, it has adopted an asymmetric warfare doctrine to exploit the weaknesses of other states with the aim of making Iran secure against external threats.

 As Bahgat and Ehteshami stress several times throughout the book, "The Islamic Republic's military doctrine is essentially a defensive one." Therefore, one of the main goals of the asymmetric doctrine is "to convince those adversaries that they would pay a high price if they attacked Iran."

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