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RAND emeritus scholar and co-author of the classic Netwars and Networks, David Ronfeldt asked an astute question in reaction to my post proposing a grand strategy board:

I almost always see strategy defined as the art of relating ends and means.  It’s defined that way time after time, often but not always with a few extra criteria added here and there.  Usually something about plans or resources.  But I’ve long felt that I’d prefer to define strategy as the art of positioning.  That presumes a consideration of ends and means, but in my view, it’s not as abstract a definition, and gets to the core concern right away.  In looking around for who else may favor such a definition, the best and almost only leader I find is Michael Porter and his writings about corporate strategy.  He’s says explicitly that strategy is the art of positioning – apropos market positioning in particular.  maybe in some long-forgotten moment, that’s where I got the notion in the first place.  Meanwhile, i’ve been told that, of military strategists, Jomini emphasizes positioning the most.  This is not my area of expertise.  I’d like to know more:  is the “ends and means” view so accepted, so basic, so adaptable, that it’s not worth questioning?  What’s to be gained, and/or lost, by the “positioning” view?  Is there any strategy that isn’t about positioning? 

This is a great question, because it is a clarifying question about fundamentals.

I am not familiar with Micheal Porter’s work, but Chet Richards pointed out in his excellent Certain to Win that there are some significant differences in applying strategic thinking to business compared to using strategy in war. While war and the market both represent dynamic, competitive environments which require actors to adapt to survive, war is a destructive enterprise while business is ultimately transactional, cooperative and constructive, though you may have to overcome competition and conflict first. Conflict and competition on which the state and society place tight legal constraints to which buyers and sellers must conform.  Arguably, this explains the drift toward oligopolistic competition in regulated capiltalist economies: the constraints of rule of law which govern market actors would tend to give an even greater emphasis to “positioning” in peaceful economic competition than in warfare.

What about “positioning” and strategy generally?

Strategy is indeed defined by most experts as the alignment of Ends -Ways -Means. In my opinion, it is the most practical starting point for people of any level of strategic skill to consider what is to be done in the short or medium term within a known framework ( a theater, region, an alliance system, nation-state etc.). “Positioning” falls within this trinity under “ways” – for example, something as simple as seizing the high ground or as complicated as maneuver warfare theory is, in essence, an effort to acquire a comparative advantage over your opponent. Having comparative advantages are always good but they are usually transitory rather than being something that can be “locked in” permanently ( though man has tried – ex. the Great Wall of China, Constantinople on the Dardanelles, the age of fortresses in 16th-17th C. Europe, Mercantilist Policy, Massive Retaliation etc.). Normally, you have to keep moving, tactically adjusting your position in response to your opponent’s efforts to re-balance.

Positioning also exists outside the trinity of Ends-Ways-Means as the initial starting conditions that shape subsequent strategy. The phrase “Where you stand depends on where you sit” conveys the lesson that our perspectives, our premises, are deeply affected from where we begin. Geopolitical theory is rooted in this idea but positioning can be something other than physical location – politics and culture are positional because they are embeded with values and what we value to some extent determines what our Ends are going to be and how we perceive and define the problem for which we will employ a strategy to overcome.

The latter kind of positioning can be *very* problematic because ideological concerns inflame passions, distort our rational calculus of matching means to ends and generally introduce ever larger amounts of irrationality into strategic decision making at the expense of empirical observation. Boyd would call this a “mismatch” with reality from a corrupted OODA Loop and a textbook example would be the behavior of Imperial Japanese leaders in WWII. Launching an unwinnable war with the United States and prosecuting it almost to national annihilation was driven to a demonstrable extent by Japanese cultural norms related to honor, debt (on-giri), the “Imperial Will” and dysfunctional constitutional arrangements that made extricating Japan from a strategic cul-de-sac politically impossible. To a lesser extent, American prosecution of the war in Vietnam and the occupation of Iraq share similar irrationality derived from a priori ideological positioning.

A final observation:

When time horizons are very long and/or the problem is ill-defined and the framework boundaries vague or unknown or uncertainty high, the cognitive requirements for strategic thinking shift and it may not be possible to move beyond speculating as to Ends to the point where action should or even can be taken effectively. More information may be required. 0r greater means than exist. The problem may only be a hypothetical potentiality, rather than an actual problem. This point is one that is likely to be disputed as even being in the realm of strategy and could belong in that of theory or politics, depending on your perspective.

Many readers here are students of strategy or even professional strategists. In the interest of brevity, I’ve avoided getting into the specifics of schools of strategic thought or Clausewitz vs. Sun Tzu or Jomini, but I’d like to invite readers to weigh in on Dr. Ronfeldt’s question or my response as they wish.

Two items:

RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt called my attention today (thanks David!) to this article by futurist David Brin:

Forgetting our American tradition:The folly of relying exclusively on a professional protector caste

Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste.  Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger. 

This emphasis changed, dramatically, starting with the Second World War, but accelerating after Vietnam. Some reasons for the shift toward professionalism were excellent and even overdue.  Nevertheless, it is clearly long past-time for a little perspective and reflection.

Over the course of the last two decades, while doing “future threats” consultations for DoD, DTRA, NRO, CIA, the Navy, Air Force, etc., I have watched this distinction grow ever-more stark — contrasting an older American reflex that relied on citizen-level resilience vs. the more recent emphasis on anticipation and the surgical removal of threats.  Inexorably, the Protector Class has increasingly come to consider itself wholly separate from the Protected.  In fact, our military, security and intelligence services have reached a point where – even when they engage in self-critical introspection – they seem unable to even ask questions that ponder resilience issues.

Instead, the question always boils down to: “How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?”

While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized.  It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action…..

Read the rest here.

Secondly, I wanted to highlight that Don Vandergriff, a student of John Boyd’s strategic philosophy and the pioneer of adaptive leadership training , recently received a glowing mention in Fast Company magazine:

How to Buck the System the Right Way

….What GM is doing is mining the talent of its leaders in the middle. To lead up effectively, there are three characteristics you need to leverage.

Credibility. You must know your stuff especially when you are not the one in charge. When you are seeking to make a case to senior manager, or even to colleagues, what you know must be grounded in reality. At the same time, so often, as is the case at GM, you need to be able to think and act differently. So your track record reinforces your credibility. That is, what you have done before gives credence to what you want to do in the future.

Influence. Knowing how to persuade others is critical for someone seeking to effect change. If you do not have line authority, how else but through influence can you succeed? Your influence is based on credibility, but also on your proven ability to get things done. Sometimes persuasion comes down to an ability to sweet talk the higher ups as well as put a bit of muscle on colleagues (nicely of course) in order push your initiative through.

Respect. Mavericks, which GM said it was looking for, may not always be the most easiest people to get along with on a daily basis. After all, they are ones seeking to buck the system. But mavericks who succeed are ones who have the best interests of the organization at heart and in time earn the respect of thier colleagues.

One maverick I know who has been pushing to change the way the U.S. Army trains and promotes its officer corps is Don Vandergriff. A former Army major and twice named ROTC instructor of the year while at Georgetown, Vandergriff has tirelessly badgered the Army’s senior leadership to institute changes that would recognize and promote officers who knew how to lead from the middle.

And now, after more than a decade of his writing and teaching, it is paying off. West Point has become the latest but perhaps the most prestigious Army institution to teach principles of adaptive decision making that Don developed. Many of Don’s students have implemented such lessons successfully under combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here. 

Don’s methods excel at getting students to think creatively under the constraints of limited information, situational uncertainty and time pressure ( making the cognitive effect somewhat akin to the effects produced by the Socratic method and complex game playing).

ADDENDUM:

This would also be a suitable post to remind readers that Dr. Chet Richards has moved his blogging operations to a new site, Fast Transients.

Adjust your favorites and blogrolls accordingly.

John Arqilla, along with David Ronfeldt, was the pioneering military and security theorist who forseaw the rise of networked non-state adversaries, which they detailed in their now classic book, Networks and Netwars. Below, in a Foreign Policy mag article, Arquilla expounds on the failure of the Pentagon to adapt sufficiently to leverage the power of networks or counter those opponents who have done so.

The New Rules of War

When militaries don’t keep up with the pace of change, countries suffer. In World War I, the failure to grasp the implications of mass production led not only to senseless slaughter, but also to the end of great empires and the bankruptcy of others. The inability to comprehend the meaning of mechanization at the outset of World War II handed vast tracts of territory to the Axis powers and very nearly gave them victory. The failure to grasp the true meaning of nuclear weapons led to a suicidal arms race and a barely averted apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis.
 
Today, the signs of misunderstanding still abound. For example, in an age of supersonic anti-ship missiles, the U.S. Navy has spent countless billions of dollars on “surface warfare ships” whose aluminum superstructures will likely burn to the waterline if hit by a single missile. Yet Navy doctrine calls for them to engage missile-armed enemies at eyeball range in coastal waters.
 
The U.S. Army, meanwhile, has spent tens of billions of dollars on its “Future Combat Systems,” a grab bag of new weapons, vehicles, and communications gadgets now seen by its own proponents as almost completely unworkable for the kind of military operations that land forces will be undertaking in the years ahead. The oceans of information the systems would generate each day would clog the command circuits so that carrying out even the simplest operation would be a terrible slog.
 
And the U.S. Air Force, beyond its well-known devotion to massive bombing, remains in love with extremely advanced and extremely expensive fighter aircraft — despite losing only one fighter plane to an enemy fighter in nearly 40 years. Although the hugely costly F-22 turned out to function poorly and is being canceled after enormous investment in its production, the Air Force has by no means given up. Instead, the more advanced F-35 will be produced, at a cost running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. All this in an era in which what the United States already has is far better than anything else in the world and will remain so for many decades.
 
These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill…..”

Read the rest here.

It was nice to see Arquilla give some props to VADM Art Cebrowski, who is underappreciated these days as a strategic thinker and is much critricized by people who seldom bothered to read anything he actually wrote. Or who like to pretend that he had said a highly networked Naval task force is a good way to tackle an insurgency in an arid, mostly landlocked, semi-urban, middle-eastern nation.

It also occurs to me that one of the reasons that the USAF resisted drones tooth and nail is that robotics combined with swarming points to en end ( or serious diminishment) of piloted warplanes. Eliminating the design requirements implicit in human pilots makes for a smaller, faster, more maneuverable, more lethal aircraft that will probably be infinitely cheaper to make, more easily risked in combat and usable for “swarming”. Ditto attack helicopters.

Of course, nuclear bombers will probably stay in human hands. Probably.

ADDENDUM:

Contentious Small Wars Council thread on Arquilla begun by “student of war” and defense consultant Wilf Owen. I have weighed in as has Shlok Vaidya.

Charles Cameron responds at length to a comment left by RAND emeritus David Ronfeldt in the previous post:

In response to David Ronfeldt:

David Ronfeldt wrote an important comment on my last post, taking off from it in a very interesting direction, and I think its deserves its own thread. I am going to quote the main thrust of it here, then address some of the issues he raises. David writes:

What i wonder about is the nature of a mind bent on measured reciprocity vs. a millenarian mind (like those you’ve written about before)? Millenarians, I gather, aren’t much into measured tit-for-tat thinking. If they are, then maybe they really aren’t all that millenarian. they may think they are on a righteous, vengeful mission ordained by God – but it’s so tit-for-tat that it falls short of being truly millenarian.

Or is there a spectrum of combinations? I can imagine a millenarian using tit-for-tat thinking as part of a rationale for wanting to inflict apocalyptic punishment. But I can also suppose that it’s a mental game that a millenarian leader uses to help explain his views to attract new adherents. If so, who/what may be examples of minds that combine millenarian with measured reciprocity?

Here’s my response:

I think it boils down to a difference between two types of millenarian. Some millenarians are just outright antinomian from the gitgo. Their apocalyptic beliefs fundamentally contradict the moral tenets of the
surrounding culture, and they feel cut loose from them. The Brethren of the Free Spirit felt free to cut the purses of others for the benefit of the cause, but I’m not sure that the Perfecti of the Cathars did, and I’m pretty sure the early Franciscan “spirituals” wouldn’t dream of it. So there are others, like the Spirituals, who are far from antinomian, living according to a strict code — which in their case presumably included the moral injunctions of Christ in the Beatitudes, albeit interpreted pretty stringently.

This raises the possibility that some millenarians may feel obligated to the constraints of a traditional path up until such time as their messianic hope-figure appears, at which point he will himself be able to give specific, timely (end-timely) guidance. Thus reports of the Mahdi as warrior must be distinguished from reports of warfare engaged in by his followers in the hope of attracting him.

The Christian apocalyptic writer Joel Richardson made an interesting comment touching on this issue. Describing an interview he gave on NPR, he wrote (in what he would agree are broad strokes with possible
exceptions):

I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.

The whole issue of “hastening the arrival”, including means proposed to achieve it, and whether indeed it is even possible, deserves serious comparative religious study. I’d only note here the Israeli analyst Reuven Paz’s seminal 2006 essay, “Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude Towards Hizballah and Iran“, and follow up with Tim Furnish’s comment on the way this concept has been stretched by others (Paz writes only about Sunni jihadists) to cover (putatively) Iran’s (Shi’a) nuclear program. Furnish, who attended one of the recent Mahdist conferences in Tehran, explains the misapplied notion:

It posits that there is a strain of Islamic eschatological thought which hopes to force Allah’s hand in sending the Mahdi, as it were, via sparking a major conflagration (nuclear, or otherwise) with the West (either the U.S. or Israel). This may be true of some of the Sunni jihadits with an apocalyptic bent, but there is very little evidence that such an idea is operative in the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ayatollahs may be cut-throat, anti-Israeli and anti-American-but they are not stupid. They know full well that any nuclear attack on Israel of the U.S. would be met with a crushing retaliation. (Besides, what good would it do for the Mahdi to come and establish his global caliphate over smoking radioactive ruins?)”

Discussing Christian apocalyptic rhetoric in his book, Arguing the Apocalypse, Stephen O’Leary writes, “The End itself is beyond the capacity of human discourse to hasten or postpone; the deterministic construction of the tragic apocalypse eliminates contingency from history”.

By the time the arriving or returning one has arrived or returned, things are very different. Having the absolute divine sanction — being, in the case of the Mahdi, by definition “Rightly Guided” — he (or I suppose, “she” if appropriate) can order people killed in much the same way that Krishna at the Battle of Kurukshetra could, saying in effect, “they’re dead already”.

To be sure, this “black and white” quality of alignment between the forces of good and evil will more than likely be building towards a climax during the “end times” run-up to the appearance — Stephen O’Leary again, “as the predicted End approaches, apocalyptic rhetors increasingly tend to view their opponents or interlocutors as representatives of demonic forces…”

Bin Laden, it seems to me, clearly feels constrained by Quranic notions of warfare, and his address to the US before the 2004 elections contained by my count at least four echoes of the ayat I cited from the
Quran, the most vivid of which was his comment, “And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in
America in order that they taste some of what we tasted…” — which takes the idea of measured reciprocity very literally sense indeed! Another example: as Steve Coll noted in a Washington Post piece in 2005,
“Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese
imperial surrender policy.”

Finally, I’d like to point out the enormous discrepancy here between two worldviews.

The view enshrined in the Geneva Conventions holds that certain acts are permissible in warfare, while certain others are so ruthlessly immoral as to constitute “war crimes” and are never permitted.

The Quranic view also holds this — but with the specific exception of measured reciprocity.Here is Brig. SK Malik on the topic, in his book The Qur’anic Concept of War:

According to an age-old tradition, fighting in Arabia was prohibited during the three sacred months of Ziqad, Zil Haj and Muharram, and the Holy Qur’an issued directions for the observance of this custom. ‘The prohibited month for the prohibited month,’ the Book said, ‘and so for all things prohibited,– there is the Law of Equality. If then anyone transgresses the prohibition against you, transgress ye likewise against him but fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.’ [2.194] The book likewise commanded the Muslims to respect the Arab custom of observing truce at the Sacred Mosque, on a reciprocal basis. ‘But fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there,’ was the Quranic injunction in the matter [2.191]. On both these issues, the Muslims, no doubt, were nevertheless counseled to show restraint. The Quranic injunction that ‘Allah is with those who restrain themselves’ speaks of the importance attached to tolerance and forbearance.

One system draws a line, and what is below it is impermissible — the other holds a mirror up to the opposing force, and what goes beyond the limits of image it reflects is impermissible. And both systems call for
restraint — which in time of war is not the easiest of virtues to maintain.

But that’s another story — the story of the duel of Ali bin Abi Talib with ‘Amru bin ‘Abd Wudd, in fact…

Rand emeritus David Ronfeldt posed an interesting question in the comment section of an earlier post that I wanted to bring to the fore, make a few observations about and open for some crowdsourcing to see if anyone has some good information on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC or Pasdaran) leadership:

I had a stray thought this morning about Iran’s IRGC, and wanted to risk asking about it somewhere.  in doing a quick search of blogs I follow, this is the only one that has recently made passing reference to the IRGC, specifically in this post.  so I’ll try first here.

I keep re-learning what a massive operation the IRGC is – tantamount to  what Jane Jacobs termed a “monstrous moral hybrid” perhaps.  the IRGC/IRG starts as an effort to consolidate various paramiltary forces following the 1979 iranian revolution.  now it has its own ground, naval, air, and special forces.  more interestingly, it has expanded economically, and acquired assets to become a multi-billions enterprise, including public construction projects, and even dentistry and travel.  it can shut out private business competition, for it can easily underbid and then overrun, while also using recruits and conscripts as labor.  in sum, it represents an hybrid of tribal, hierarchical, and market priniciples, if not network ones too. 

Now, that supports the usual way of looking at this:  just a gigantic hybrid operating inside a state, almost as a semi-autonomous state within a state.  and that’s not uncommon in many countries.  the chinese and cuban militaries are heavily involved in economic enterprises too.  and in parallel fashion, this is a growing trend  among criminal enterprises as well, like the zetas mentioned in your reading  recommendations above.  

but then I had this stray thought:  the IRGC is not so much a state within a state, as a caliphate within a state.  I am not well-informed about how to define and think about caliphates.  but the little I know leads me to think this might be a thought worth further consideration and analysis.  esp. if the irgc could be considered as a model for an emerging Shia caliphate, and one that is way ahead of radical Sunni aspirations. 

so: an emerging caliphate within a state.  any comment?  advice for further thinking?   

I am not a Persianist or expert on Twelver Islam but David’s questions cross a number of disciplinary boundaries, as most interesting questions usually do. Using one “lens” here, such as security studies or Iranian history or IR theory, by themselves, are not enough with a semi-opaque government like that of Iran. This analysis probably should be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, so I welcome anyone out there with a relevant perspective to add what you know about Iran and the Pasdaran in the comment section.

I think that the issues here are structure, behavior and motivation of the Pasdaran as an institution within Iran.

First on the “state within a state”model:

If we look at previous historical examples of “state within a state” entities with which to compare the Pasdaran, the SS and the NKVD stand out as superior in my mind to that of China’s PLA, which was always tightly integrated into the CCP ( much moreso than the Soviet Red Army leadership in the USSR) and as a regular army, never dominated the party after 1949.  By contrast, the SS after 1934 quickly “mestastasized” to “colonize” the Gestapo ( memory tells me that SS men were something like a third of Gestapo officers) and Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler attempted to do so with other ministries by granting influential Nazi party organ and German state officials high SS rank, enjoying a limited success in penetrating other centers of power in the Third Reich. The war and the Holocaust allowed the SS to field an elite guard army in the Waffen-SS and supplementary expeditionary/constabulary forces abroad in the form of Einsatzgruppen, Totenkopf and ordinary reserve police battalions under SS command.

The expanding concentration camp structure permitted the SS to become an economic power within the Third Reich in its own right both as a provider of slave labor to private industry and Nazi ministries for Labor, Agriculture and Armaments and War Production and in factories and mines controlled directly by SS concentration camp commandants. Albert Speer was Himmler’s most determined (and successful) rival in thwarting the growing power of the SS in economic affairs and Speer’s last book, published posthumously, INFILTRATION is a rambling but detailed account of Himmler’s bureaucratic imperialism and chilling ambitions for a postwar Nazi world ( an understudied and valuable book for insights into what might have been had Hitler won WWII).

The NKVD in the Beria period had an even more privileged and extensive place in Stalin’s USSR than the SS occupied in the Third Reich but the Soviet planned economy was substantially different from that of Germany’s or that of Iran’s today. While the NKVD had its own empire of enterprises, the capacity of the NKVD to maximize their value was sharply limited by fear of Stalin”s paranoid caprice and the absence of any private economy in the Soviet Union with which to profit from any ill-gotten gains. Nazi Germany’s weird, Fascist, economy with it’s mixture of oligopolistic cartels, private enterprise and state planning ( described well in Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy) and the place of the SS in it is a better analogy to Iran’s state enterprises, bazaari business elite, bonyads and undercapitalized small business sectors

On the IRGC as the seed or kernel of a “Caliphate”:

This is an ideological and motivational question that is apart from normal, secular, bureaucratic expansionism.

First, I’m not certain that “caliphate” is the best way to frame the discussion. All Shia Muslims are literally the Shiat ‘Ali or “Party of Ali”, going back to the dispute over succession to the Prophet Muhammed. I have to heavily qualify my comments by stating this is not my area of expertise, but as far as I am aware, “caliphate” has not been a major part of historical Shia dialogue as the modern Iranian clerical establishment emerged under the Qajar dynasty or later under the Pahlavis. The Persian Shahs did not claim that title, which was held by the Ottoman Sultan until it was abolished by Ataturk. A more appropriate question, which I believe David is getting at, would be “Is the IRGC leadership Mahdist?”.

If the IRGC is orthodox Shia in its orientation, then we might expect that the Pasdaran would behave more or less as a secular, if ideologically hardline, national security bureaucracy and a force within Iran for “siloviki” policies, Iranian style.

If the IRGC senior leadership has a heavy crossover in membership with the Hojjatiyeh, that would be far more worrisome and would raise the level of uncertainty regarding Iranian state behavior in crisis situations .

“Mahdi” theology is semi-heretical Islamic doctrine and has differing forms in Sunni and Shia Islam, on which I am not qualified to opine, but for our purposes, we can state that it contains a fairly dangerous element of apocalyptic millenarianism as a worldview. Moreover, in the Iranian context, the quasi-divine Hidden Imam emerging from Occultation, as virtually a messenger of Allah, would not be bound by any of the constraints contained within the Quran. Islamic jurisprudence normally disdains “innovation”, in interpreting scripture, but the Mahdi (and more importantly, his true believer followers) would be the great and messianic exception.

Of course, what we really need here is some hard data ( or at least reasonably informed speculation) regarding the factions within the Pasdaran and the clerical hierarchy, and their strength relative to one another. Since the election protests, the Pasdaran appears to have become the major political force inside the regime, akin to the KGB in the days of Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, except the KGB in the 80’s saw the need for economic reform in the USSR and the Pasdaran today appears to be entirely reactionary in its policy prescriptions for Iran.

Comments? Questions? Complaints?