Quote (zorzin @ Jul 31 2024 06:25pm)
In terms of quality/quantity with war tested results, I still stand by my statement.
Russia mogs Iran in terms of quality
China's (potential) quantity is unrivaled.
But Iran (imo) has perfected the perfect balance in order to achieve a regional dominance in the ME. They're giving hypersonics to the houthis and emps to hezz on an ever-increasing scale. Their arsenal of different missle types is vast and we've got to see them in action (no theoretical performance debates).
This isn't to say that Iran achieved this because their engineers/scientists are the best in the world, it's simply because after the war of the twin cities against iraq(or w/e it was called) some higher-ups decided that Iran would dedicate all her resources to pursue missle technology and this has payed off dividends. Iran is stuck with virtually zero boomer-legacy weapons (aircraft carriers/tanks/anything that dones like) and instead pursued things like mrbms that get fired on "train tracks" deep underground that operates like a freaking conveyor belt.
Russia/China/America does not have the luxury of not playing superpower and abandoning their conventional toys but Iran does and did.
Also, I can't stress enough the variety of Iran's missles and how quickly they developed them; I say this as someone who wants Israel (america) to put a full stop on the irgc proxies who target American bases and Israel willy-nilly.
battle tested is a weak metric imo, look at the franco prussian war. people thought the battle hardened french couldnt be beat, until bismark spanked them and founded the german empire on the back of victory.
now, i dont doubt that they could reach a volume of missiles to assure MAD in the middle east, specifically enough to overwhelm the iron dome with relative ease, but from a simple tech perspective they're just not first class. like i said they're above north korea, even without a nuke, but they're B-tier and they know it. first class weaponry doesnt get used, let alone shipped off to goat herders to lob at israel's dome.
now we just have to hope their strategy of all out war economy works out as well as it did with the soviets. there's a lot of parallels, civil unrest due to economic striff and a fairly homogenous fuel based economy. development of nukes doesnt mean use of nukes in any case, the regime hopefully is as non-suicidal as the kims and just addicted to sabre rattling.