While Iran remains the focus of regional security concerns, key elements of the United States’ intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capacity to have ‘eyes on’ Tehran are being drawn elsewhere, as other areas demand even greater attention. The Gulf region’s own capabilities cannot yet replace all the allied resources being re-tasked, and Gulf Cooperation Council countries remain reticent to cooperate on ISR.
Continuity can often be a welcome feature, but in the Gulf region it is also an issue. Iran remains the overwhelming security concern for the Gulf states, while their collective capacity to counter Tehran continues to be hampered by a reluctance to cooperate more closely. Four decades after its founding in 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has yet to live up fully to its name.
The hesitancy over greater collective engagement in the defence and security realm is not new, but there has not been much progress either. And while this is problematic in and of itself, it is also being compounded by the demands of other regions on the United States, which is still the Middle East’s primary security guarantor. Washington may use the language of optimising force posture, but in practical terms this means a reduction in its regional capabilities as these are drawn elsewhere. Along with redeploying combat capabilities, the US is also shifting the focus of what are sometimes called ‘high-value, low-volume enablers’, including crewed and uninhabited intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems. When the region was the United States’ priority, demand for ISR still could not be matched with available assets; even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the pull of the Indo-Pacific and concern over China were a draw on US ISR capacity. The war in Ukraine has served only to accelerate this move away from the Gulf region.
Unfortunately, the need to observe Iran to better understand its military activities and to help with intelligence assessments of the threat it poses has not lessened. This paper considers the value of ISR as both a contributor to regional deterrence and an essential element of armed forces’ capacity in the event of war.
‘Chapter One: The Armed Forces’ reviews Iran’s current military capabilities and the regional-security challenge Iran presents. It assesses how Tehran’s armed forces and its equipment inventory may develop over the course of this decade and the wider regional ramifications of some possible outcomes. This section focuses on Iran’s military rather than its use of proxies, though it considers how proxies are supplied with weaponry and the contribution of ISR in efforts to interdict proxies and disrupt supply routes.
‘Chapter Two: Geospatial Exploitation’ uses available open-source imagery to illustrate the value of ISR, along with examples of imagery targets to show how ISR can be exploited. While this section uses only visual imagery, this is not intended to reflect any primacy over other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Rather, this is a function of the commercial availability of such products and their value for illustrative purposes. Although the images of sites of military interest are all derived from a commercial-satellite provider, and underscore the value of geospatial ISR, airborne platforms, crewed systems and uninhabited systems are at the very least valuable complements. These can provide an independent capability if a geospatial ISR component is not available at the national level. Though they have to be operated in national or international airspace, crewed and uninhabited systems are more responsive and can more easily be re-tasked. This chapter also considers in broad terms some of the kinds of data that can be acquired from a medium- to high-altitude platform being operated in international airspace off Iran’s western seaboard.
‘Chapter Three: Regional Demands and External Draws’ reviews regional ISR capabilities at the national level along with the platforms deployed by the US and others. It also considers the continuing challenge of improving intra-GCC cooperation and what obstacles remain. US efforts to encourage broader information sharing among GCC countries have so far failed to fully meet this aim. While greater cooperation remains the goal in the near-term, the US now appears at least in some areas to be placing greater emphasis again on a hub-and-spoke approach as a means of supporting regional-security needs and laying the groundwork for improving regional cooperation. The chapter considers selected GCC ISR capabilities across domains, as well as US capacity within the region. Options for bolstering the regional capacity for ISR collection and exploitation are also appraised.
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