The Long War: Iran’s Oldest Strategy

Most discussions of Iran revolve around oil, escalation, and regime change. Yet Iran today feels easier to understand as part of a much older pattern. For more than 2,500 years, states on the Iranian plateau have favoured patience, distance, and endurance over any kind of immediate full-on confrontation with stronger enemies.

To understand Iran today, it therefore helps to trawl through Persian military history.

Iran has been described, unfairly, as two deserts—one with salt and one without, though it is also forested and full of mountains. From all this has emerged one of the world’s most durable martial traditions.

From the chariot nobles and “Immortals” of the Achaemenid Empire to the armoured cavalry of later dynasties—and ultimately to the modern Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—Iranian military institutions have repeatedly adapted.

During the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi forces saturated the battlefield with chemical weapons while much of the world looked away. Yet Iranian forces endured. That experience still shapes the country’s strategic thinking.

Today, Iran famously emphasises asymmetric warfare—indirect and comparatively inexpensive methods designed to offset the technological advantages of powers such as the United States and Israel. But across the centuries, Persian warfare has often favoured similar patience, mobility, and indirect pressure.

Long before the Persian Empire came about, Indo-Iranian tribes spread like seeds across the Eurasian steppe. The ancestors of Persians, Medes, and Scythians were nomadic pastoralists whose warrior culture centred on horse archery and mobile raiding.

I will always remember the late Iran expert Michael Axworthy telling me at the French House in central London how Persian culture liked to preserve the memory of its warrior elites in the Shahnameh, where heroes famously fought knowing that “a man’s renown is what remains of him.”

Over time groups such as the Medes and Persians formed states. Emerging from these tribal warrior societies, they became more than capable administrators and empire-builders, though their romantic steppe heritage—particularly elite cavalry—continued to shape Iranian warfare.

The first great Persian imperial conqueror was Cyrus the Great. His empire, founded around 550 BC, became one of the largest the ancient world had ever seen. Achaemenid armies fielded archers and spearmen supported by cavalry and elite guards such as the Immortals—a 10,000-man corps whose ranks were continually replenished to that exact number. [It was pointed out to me that part of the weird Christian Zionist hagiography of Trump hailed him as a modern-day Cyrus the Great.]

During the Greco-Persian Wars, these armies brought together Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Central Asians under one single imperial command. One encounter remains especially famous: the Battle of Thermopylae, where Leonidas I’s Greek force resisted Xerxes I’s invading army. The episode has been retold so many times in Western culture, most recently in the film 300, where Persians appear less as soldiers than as grotesques—an example of how easily enemies become caricatures.

“From childhood we are taught to ride and to shoot,” declares the hero in Gore Vidal’s novel Creation. Vidal uses this idea repeatedly to show that Persians were raised as horsemen and warriors from youth, not trained later as professional soldiers. The Greeks admired individual glory in battle, Vidal is saying, while Persians value order, discipline, and organisation.

When the Achaemenid Empire collapsed under Alexander the Great, however, Persian political power fragmented with it. Yet they say the military traditions of the Iranian plateau did not disappear. If anything, they evolved.

The Parthian Empire developed one of the ancient world’s most distinctive fighting styles. Its armies relied on highly mobile horse archers this time supported by heavily armoured cataphracts. Like the great horse warriors of the Native American Plains, the Parthians were legendary riders, able to twist in the saddle and fire arrows backwards in the famous ‘Parthian shot.’

These tactics proved devastating at the Battle of Carrhae, where Parthian forces destroyed a Roman army commanded by Marcus Licinius Crassus. Later writers claimed molten gold was poured into Crassus’s mouth—perhaps apocryphal, but too memorable to be lost.

The broader lesson was familiar on the Iranian plateau. Stronger enemies could often be worn down through distance, manoeuvre, and patience.

The Sasanian Empire refined this. Its elite warriors, the Savaran, were heavily armoured noble cavalrymen armed with long lances and swords, forming the backbone of a state that for centuries rivalled Rome and Byzantium.

Exhausted by long wars with Rome, however, the Sasanian state did eventually collapse under the Arab conquest in AD 651. The empire fell, but Persian administrative and military traditions continued. Early Islamic rulers adopted many of these, just as later conquerors—from the Seljuks to the Mongols—also found that governing Iran meant working within Persian traditions of statecraft and war.

A distant echo of this pattern perhaps appears today in the IRGC’s increasingly challenged support for regional militias from Hezbollah and Hamas to the Houthis in Yemen and the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan.

Under the Qajar dynasty, attempts to modernise the army included the creation of the Persian Cossack Brigade, a Russian-trained unit that became Iran’s most effective military force. After the Russian Revolution the brigade passed into Iranian hands, and its commander, Reza Khan, used it to launch the 1921 coup that brought the Pahlavi monarchy to power—an event quietly tolerated by Britain.

Today, long after the overthrow of the Shah, Iran fields two main military institutions: the national army and the earlier mentioned, still powerful IRGC created after the 1979 revolution.

The Islamic Republic was immediately tested by war. Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980 forced Iran into an eight-year struggle fought under isolation and repeated Iraqi chemical attacks. Iran’s conventional forces struggled against Iraq’s better-equipped army.

Yet the war delivered a crucial lesson: survival itself could count as success.

Basically, endurance and mobilisation allowed the Islamic Republic to outlast what many expected would be swift collapse. The conflict left a deep imprint on Iranian military thinking, reinforcing a threatening preference for attrition and indirect pressure rather than conventional confrontation with technologically superior enemies. The pattern will be familiar.

The Iranian warrior is no longer a horseman but a modern soldier equipped with missiles, drones, and cyber capabilities. Yet the imagery of the past remains relevant. Heroes like Rostam from the Shahnameh appear alongside Sasanian cavalry and the martyr traditions of the Iran–Iraq War in Iran’s modern military imagination.

Their current strategy is therefore less an anomaly than the latest expression of a long tradition. The steppe archers who once hassled and harried their enemies, the Parthians who exhausted Roman legions through manoeuvre and distance, and later Persian states that absorbed new technologies while preserving older traditions all find an echo in Iran’s reliance today on missiles, drones, proxy militias, and dispersed forces.

Rather than seeking immediate battlefield triumph, Iran appears today to be preparing for something else. This is a long contest of attrition.

The “distance” once commanded by the Parthian horse archer has not disappeared—it has simply changed form. Where a nomad once used the range of a bow, the modern state uses missiles or the geopolitical buffer of proxy militias.

The principle remains the same: this is to keep the enemy at arm’s length and wear down their resolve.

Geography reinforces this strategy. Don’t forget Iran sits astride the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, surrounded by mountains and deserts that favour defence and attrition.

If history tells us anything, Iran will not try to win quickly. Instead it will aim to ensure that any enemy drawn into conflict finds itself fighting a long war.

Foreign powers have underestimated Iran for more than twenty-five centuries—and repeatedly discovered that Iranian states possess a stubborn capacity to endure, adapt, and outlast stronger enemies. What we are witnessing today may therefore be the opening phase of a highly regrettable conflict shaped not by decisive battles, but by endurance.

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