[moopierof]

Also, if Iran was handed like Gulf War I, people would probably think it was pretty awesome. Considering the set up of the military of Iran, in that type of war they would look even more ridiculous.

The Iranian military is rather ungainly actually. It follows the typical Arab model of having two parallel armies. There are the conventional forces, which consist of the regular army, navy, and air force (which I will refer to as "the regulars" from here on for ease of communicating). The purpose of the Regular branches is to defend the nation of Iran, while the five branches of the Islamic Revolution's Guard Corps (Ground Forces, Navy, Air Forces, Basij, and Quds Force) exist to defend the state. This creates several problems.

First there is an enormous difference between these two forces. Since the IRGC is designed to defend the state from external and internal enemies, the regular services are purposely kept in a weakened state to make the IRGC's mission easier. Training, leadership, equipment, and political influence are all inferior to the IRGC. What this means is that in any war, the ability of the regular forces to defend Iran may come into serious doubt, and the IRGC may be forced to adopt that role in addition to its own responsibilities.

Second, the two services hate each other. This goes far beyond the turf wars that the Pentagon sees. The IRGC actively seeks the marginalization of the regular forces, to the point that the government has rewritten history texts about the Iran-Iraq War that actually omits the participation of regular forces in campaigns, IIRC. Not only that, but this rivalry has lead to a near total lack of cooperation between the two, which leads to the third problem. If I remember right, this lead to a large Basij unit during the war with Iraq being utterly wiped out, when their officers had simply assumed that the regular army would be supporting their attack, despite the fact that they hadn't bothered sharing any of the planning or resulting decisions with the regular officers.

Third, command and coordination for them during a US attack is going to be a hellish problem. They have two parallel forces divided into a total of eight different branches with entirely seperate and parallel chains of command. Unlike the US military model in which non-commissioned officers are given a great deal of ability to make decisions as needed, decisions are made much further up the chain of commmand. This means that information needs to be passed up to a higher level before someone has the authority to deal with it, and then pass the new orders back down the line.

Not only is their commmand structure slow to adapt to a changing situation, but the IRGC and regular forces rarely conduct joint-wargames or exercises, and the Iranian government limits direct communication between senior IRGC commanders to hamper the possibility of a coup attempt by the IRGC itself. The two forces have little experience participating in peacetime exercises with each other, let alone trying to coordinate during a war.

Here's what would probably happen in the event of a US attack. We'd start with aerial attacks on communication hubs and HQs, as we usually do. Guess what happens when an overly centralized and inflexible command chain has its brains and mouths taken out? It's paralyzed and thrown into chaos, and decision making is forced onto lower level commanders who have incomplete views of the situation, no prior experience running a battle without being told exactly what to do by superiors, no idea of who is in charge, and no experience coordinating with the other forces. The regulars and IRGC would most likely fall apart into a series of desperate and virtually uncoordinated units which would be easily destroyed later.

People like to bring up Hezbollah's succcess against the IDF, and assume that the Iranians will fight the same. But quite frankly, the only forces that Iran has that are trained in that type of operation are the Quds and the Basij (to a lesser extent in the latter case), while the other services are all totally structured for conventional warfare. The Quds Force would be a problem for any occcupation, but its estimated manpower is actually less than the estimated manpower for Hezbollah. Second, the IDF is pretty inferior to the US military. They have good technology but their training, planning, and leadership are not up to par, and their combat experience in the past 20 years up until the campaign with Hezbollah had been almost entirely small scale raids and police actions against Palestinian groups, while the US army gained vastly more experience fighting the type of combat we'd see against Hezbollah or the Quds force thanks to the past five years in Iraq.

It becomes easy if we really don't try to even hold terrority and treat it like Desert Storm II instead of Operation Irani Freedom.