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Iran
Domestic Arms Production
In 1963 Iran placed all military factories under the Military
Industries Organization (MIO) of the Ministry of War. Over the
next fifteen years, military plants produced small arms ammunition,
batteries, tires, copper products, explosives, and mortar rounds
and fuses. They also produced rifles and machine guns under West
German license. In addition, helicopters, jeeps, trucks, and trailers
were assembled from imported kits. Iran was on its way to manufacturing
rocket launchers, rockets, gun barrels, and grenades, when the
Revolution halted all military activities. The MIO, plagued by
the upheavals of the time, was unable to operate without foreign
specialists and technicians; by 1981 it had lost much of its management
ability and control over its industrial facilities.
The outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and the Western arms embargo
served as catalysts for reorganizing, reinvigorating, and expanding
defense industries. In late 1981, the revolutionary government
brought together the country's military industrial units and placed
them under the Defense Industries Organization (DIO), which would
supervise production activities. In 1987 the DIO was governed
by a mixed civilian-military board of directors and a managing
director responsible for the actual management and planning activities.
Although the DIO director was accountable to the deputy minister
of defense for logistics, Iran's president, in his capacity as
the chairman of the SDC, had ultimate responsibility for all DIO
operations.
By 1986 a large number of infantry rifles, machine guns, and
mortars and some small-arms ammunition were being manufactured
locally. On several occasions, clerics delivering their Friday
sermons in Tehran claimed that Iran was engaged in a full-scale
military production program, and the Iranian press regularly reported
the successful production of new items ranging from washers to
helicopter fuselage parts. For example, the professional military
displayed, at the Permanent Industrial Exhibition in Tehran, a
collection of hermetic sealing cylinders for Chieftain tanks and
artillery flame-deflectors with artillery pads. They also displayed
Katyusha gauges, personnel carrier shafts, gears, gun pulleys,
carriages for 50mm caliber guns, 155mm shells, bases for night-vision
telescopic rifles, parts for G-3 rifles, various firing pins,
and flash suppressors for 130mm guns.
In 1987 the military took pride in being able to repair various
transmitters, receivers, and helicopter engines. A number of unverified
reports also alluded to the repair of the testing equipment of
F-14 hydraulic pressure transmitters and generators. Similarly,
Iran claimed to have manufactured an undisclosed number of Oghab
rockets, probably patterned on the Soviet-made Scud-B surface-to-surface
missiles the Iranians received from Libya. In mid-1984 the navy
claimed to have successfully repaired the gas turbines of several
vessels in Bandar-e Abbas. Moreover, Pasdaran units reportedly
repaired Soviet- and Polish-made T-54, T-55, T-62, and T-72 tanks,
captured from the Iraqis in 1982, at their armor repair center.
The monopoly of the regular armed forces over domestic arms production
and repair industries ended in 1983 when the SDC authorized the
Pasdaran to establish its own military industries. This new policy
was in line with the Pasdaran's growing political and military
weight. Beginning in 1984, the first Pasdaran armaments factory
manufactured 120mm mortars, antipersonnel grenades, various antichemical-warfare
equipment, antitank rockets, and rocket-propelled grenades.
Data as of December 1987
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