Us Gulf Iranian Competition

The report highlights Iran's growing reliance on asymmetric warfare; absorbing the lessons of the counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has sought to parlay the guerilla techniques of land warfare to other forms of conflict. Assessing US and US-equipped and - trained GCC forces as its major rivals, it has built its force posture around surviving their conventional superiority, denying them access to the Gulf, threatening commercial traffic, and targeting critical infrastructure in Gulf states (partly with missile forces that will be discussed in Part II of this balance). This updated report also addresses the issues that are likely to become major flashpoints in future US-Iranian competition, including proxies, drones, and cyber warfare. While all three of these have only emerged in the past year as aspects of true competition (proxies were almost exclusively Iranian, drones and cyberwar American), they provide a lower-cost avenue for the US and Iran to target each other. Combined with increased stress over the nuclear program and the Western-led sanctions regime, these irregular methods of competition have become the newest front for indirect yet costly signaling and pressure.