The ‘defensive power’ provided by Iran’s domestic military industry has forced the country’s "enemies" to reconsider their threats against Tehran, Rear Admiral Amir Rastegari, chief of the Defence Ministry’s Marine Industries Organisation, has said, Mehr News has reported.
Speaking in Tabriz, northwestern Iran on Friday, Rastegari recalled the sorry state of Iran’s defence industry before the 1979 Revolution, pointing to the country’s heavy reliance on foreign military equipment and thousands of foreign advisors. Today, he said, after four decades of sanctions, the country has reached self-sufficiency in the defence sphere.
“All the weapons made over the past decade rely on domestic Iranian capabilities. The sons of this homeland have manufactured ballistic, surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, surface-to-sea missiles,” the commander said, listing off the various weapons systems created by Iranian engineers over the past decade, including both reverse-engineered equipment and completely new systems which he said were on an equal playing field with those of the world’s leading military powers.
“Today…the armed forces are alert and ready,” Rastegari said. “Until a few years ago, the enemy was threatening Iran with ‘a military option being on the table’, but now speaks of ‘avoiding war’, showing the power of the Iranian nation,” he added.
Ultimately, the officer stressed that the US has restrained itself from invading Iran ‘not out of kindness,’ but out of fear of making a miscalculation, given Iran’s military capabilities.
Iran has unveiled a number of domestic missile, drone and air defence systems, as well as other equipment in recent months amid the escalation of tensions in the region following the deployment of a US carrier group in the Middle East in May, and the series of tanker sabotage attacks, ship seizures and drone shootdowns which followed.
In June, the US announced that it would be forming ‘Operation Sentinal’, a ‘maritime security operation’ to accompany commercial ships sailing through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. While multiple US allies have been invited to the coalition, only the UK and Israel have expressed interest so far. Iran has insisted that it and other regional countries were perfectly capable of ensuring security in the strategic waterway, and has warned ‘outside powers’ to stay away.
