Chapter 1 introduces the book’s main protagonists, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or Sepah, Corps. It examines the Sepah’s emergence, formal establishment, mission and duties, early institutionalization, and role in fighting counter-revolutionary and ethnic separatist groups. It traces how the Sepah formed from groups brought together by the shared goal of protecting what they saw as the revolution’s most important principles. It emerged in the days after Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, 1979 and in the midst of the Islamic Revolution’s turbulent and precarious transitory phase, which was characterized by political and violent struggles over the nature of the new regime. A particularly contentious issue, and one especially critical in the Sepah’s formation, was the fate of the Artesh, Iran’s regular military, and the nature of military power in the new regime.

The Iranian state is a complex political machine. Today’s Iran is a product of the combined forces of evolutionary change and abrupt political upheavals. The Iranian state is remarkable for its longevity and its combination of traditional and modern (Western) features, which has resulted from its long and varied life. The Islamic Republic is a product of a series of political compromises that have their origins partly in the bureaucracy created by the Pahlavis and partly in the interactions of the revolutionary coalition that wrested power from the monarch in 1979.

This chapter shows that, under the Pahlavi monarchy, the country had one of, if not the, best-equipped and best-trained military in the Middle East and North Africa region. In this chapter, the focus is on how the Imperial Armed Forces changed following the revolution. Attention is drawn to the structure of the Islamic Republic’s military machine and to the historical and strategic forces that have come to determine the shape, doctrine, and capabilities of the country’s armed forces. The impact of the revolution itself on the armed forces was significant, compounded by the role-defining war with Iraq (1980–8). As a consequence of developments since 1979, the Sepah has emerged as the republic’s most powerful fighting force, the establishment’s trusted weapon against domestic dissent, and the regime’s leading weapon in regional conflicts. This centrality is largely attributed to the IRGC Command Network.