On September 21, 1980, the day before the Iraqi invasion, the Iranian Air force was reported to have 447 functional combat aircraft stationed at 10 air bases throughout the country. There were modern Chengdu J-7s, 18 J-6s, 79 F-14s, 209 F-4 Phantom IIs, and 167 F-5s. In theory, Iran’s Air force was more than a match for the Iraqi one.
On paper, Iraq only possessed 332 combat aircraft, consisting mainly of J-7s, J-6s, MiG-17s, MiG-21s, and MiG-23s. In addition to a superior air fleet, Iranian pilots were better trained. The Iranian air force adhered to NATO flight training time requirements for combat pilots, whereas at the outbreak of war Iraqi pilots had “limited hours of flying time”.
In spite of these strengths, Iran was unable to translate them into a consequential advantage in the war. Two primary factors have been blamed for this, Iranian political purges of trained Air Force personnel and inability to procure equipment to maintain their aircraft because of sanctions.
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Mirroring the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Saddam Hussein preceded his ground invasion of Iran with a surprise air attack, intending to cripple the Iranian Air Force. On September 22, Iraq launched the surprise air assault; hitting six Iranian Air bases, and 4 Army bases. The Iranian military appears to have been wholly unprepared for the attack, as they were unable to marshal an effective air defense. However, having learned from the Six Day War, Iran had built concrete bunkers as protective storage for their combat aircraft. This successfully prevented significant damage to the Iranian air fleet and the Iraqis succeed mainly in cratering a few Iranian runways.
The Iranian Air Force, despite low morale and declining maintenance standards, responded quickly with Operation Kaman 99, bombing a series of Iraqi installations on September 23. By the night of the 23rd more than 140 Iranian Aircraft had completed sorties into Iraqi airspace. The Iraqis, anticipating such a counter-strike, had evacuated most of their aircraft to other Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia.
The Iranian counterattack is evidence that, despite shake-ups in its command structure, pre-revolution plans for countering an Iraqi attack had been left intact and the pilots were able to execute these plans efficiently. The best evidence for this is that despite the Iranian Air Force's initial ability to maintain an “aerial siege” of Iraq in the first weeks of the war, the number of sorties and mission targets of subsequently fell dramatically.
The reasons for the steep drop-off in the capabilities of the Iranian Air Force had little to do with the Iraqi ability to combat the Iranians, and more to do with the nature of the Iranian Air Force’s hardware, which consisted of American-made items that were no longer available. Iran also lacked plans for an extended war with Iraq. In addition, we can see that the revolutionary regime's purges had a great impact. The destruction of the higher echelons of the air force left a planning vacuum that could not be filled. The pilots who reacted on September 23 did so out of loyalty to their nation and with practiced plans, but as time progressed no more concrete ideas would be forthcoming.
By the end of 1980 the Iranian Air Force had lost 34 airplanes in air-to-air combat. In contrast , it lost only 13 planes in air-to-air combat in 1981, and only 9 in 1982.
The best way to understand this is to take the case of Iran’s 79 F-14s based in Shiraz and Isfahan. In the first three years of the war Iran is estimated to have only lost 3 of these planes. Yet by February 11, 1985 when the entire F-14 squadron did a flyover of Tehran (to prove that Iran still had an Air Force) it consisted of only 25 planes. The fate of these planes is connected with a policy that Iran enacted soon after the war began, the directive of "vulturisation" of the planes with mechanical problems to help keep the best planes flying. Iran, cut off from U.S sources, was reduced to “scavenging the world’s arms bazaars for spares”.
Estimating the number of Iranian aircraft that were either airworthy or flying at any given time is difficult due to a lack of information. The biggest problem plaguing the aircraft was not the Iraqis but a lack of spare parts. The "vulturisation" process reduced the Iranian air force to about 100 planes by the end of 1981. Combat losses can be said to roughly equal those due to the cannibalizing of aircraft if we accept the figure of 90 Iranian planes lost by the end of October 1980. It is estimated that by the spring of 1981, the Iranian Air Force had as few as 25 airworthy F-14s. This number would increase to about 60 as the years passed, as the Iranian government obtained spare parts from clandestine American and Israeli sources, and other countries, including South Korea and Libya.
The virtual grounding of the Iranian Air Force in late 1980 and early 1981 due to technical problems helps to explain a second dimension of the conduct of the war within Iran’s armed forces. At the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War, many Iranian veterans volunteered their services and many of those who had deserted their units the previous spring returned, swept up in a wave of national fervor to expel the Arab invader. The President of Iran, Bani-Sadr persuaded Khomeini to release many of the imprisoned Air Force personnel, mostly urgently needed pilots and technicians. Former senior officers were even recalled as "consultants". At this time, even Iranians who had left the country began to return in the hopes of helping their country during the conflict. The amnesty of a number of needed pilots, and the return of other pilots, helped the Iranian Air Force in the opening days of the war and was instrumental in slowing the Iraqi advance and spreading fear in Baghdad itself.
The increased efficacy of the Iranian Air Force can be seen in some of the more daring raids it engaged in during the last months of 1980 and in the spring of 1981. On the September 30, 1980 Iran bombed, but failed to completely destroy the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor (later destroyed by Israel). It was the first instance of an attack on a nuclear reactor and only the third on a nuclear facility in the history of the world.[1][2] On April 4, 1981 eight Iranian F-4 Phantoms embarked on an attack mission deep into Iraq, refueling airborne from a KC-707 tanker aircraft, and bombing a series of Iraqi air fields around H-3 Al Walid, near the Jordanian border.[3] In 1980 alone, 70 Iraqi planes were defeated in air -to-air combat. The number of Iraqi aircraft destroyed in the same manner in 1981 was reduced to 24, still a significant number for an Air Force able to put only a few dozen planes in the air at any time.
The return of the exiled and imprisoned pilots gave the Iranian Air Force a burst of manpower and fresh crews, but it also led to heightened suspicions by the Islamic authorities. Fears of fresh purges were realized over the years as four Colonels and four Majors who had returned to Iran were later imprisoned and shot by the government in renewed witch-hunts of those accused of disloyalty. Indeed, the government was not altogether wrong in suspecting that the Air Force was more loyal to the nation then it was to the new regime.
The decline in the capabilities of the Air Force also corresponds to a renewed crackdown and purge of the Air Force in the spring and summer of 1981. The year before, Air Force officers had been involved with the Nojeh Coup against Khomeini and president Bani-Sadr, and in August 1981 the Air Force helped Bani-Sadr to flee the country. The pilot who flew Bani-Sadr into exile was one of those whom he had helped obtain the release to fight in the war. The Air Force was grounded following the incident, and 200 pilots and their crews were imprisoned. The Islamic regime now realized the Air Force had to be brought totally under its control, and a tribunal of "Mullahs" was put in place to authorize every flight. The Islamic authorities had apparently learned this idea from the Soviets who likewise kept political officers within the ranks to sniff out disloyalty.
When pilots were given authorization to fly, they were given “the minimum amount of fuel required for the mission. In addition to low morale, Iranian pilots lacked sufficient flying time and experience due to their being grounded so often and for so long. For this reason, not one of the 81 or more Iranian pilots killed in the Iran–Iraq War was brought down in the summer of 1981. Likewise, not one Iraqi plane was destroyed in air-to-air combat between May 16 and September 1, 1981. To be an Iranian Air Force officer at that time meant facing greater risks from imprisonment or execution on the ground than from Iraqi missiles and anti-aircraft fire in the air. The Iranian Air Force essentially ceased to function.
Iran’s premier aircraft, the F-14, disappeared from the skies during this time. The Mullahs did everything they could, short of disbanding the Air Force, to ensure that it fell into line and could no longer participate in anti-Khomeini acts. Nevertheless, increased purges and a heightened state of government surveillance pushed pilots to start defecting by 1983, flying their aircraft to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Most Iranian defections during the middle and final stages of the Iran–Iraq War were the result of a joint operation (code-named “Night Harvest”) by the CIA and the Foreign Technology Division of the DoD. Its principal objective was to acquire several US-built Iranian fighter aircraft to find out how the Iranians were maintaining their F-4s, F-5s, and F-14s. Notable Iranian defections included:
The outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War was most likely looked upon as a good testing ground for new Soviet equipment, and by 1982 the Soviets had returned as technicians to Iraq, after withdrawing personnel at the outbreak of war. The Americans, though hostile to the Iranian regime, were also interested in seeing how their F-4, and especially their F-14s, would hold up against Soviet SAM systems and MiG fighters. December 1, the two superpowers were also certainly monitoring the performance of anti-aircraft systems that each had supplied to the opposing nations. In his military analysis of the Iran–Iraq War, Efraim Karsh writes: “Both Iraq and Iran began the war with impressive air defense systems… despite the large inventories, the air defense systems have been most disappointing in action… Iraq and Iran failed totally to integrate their air defense elements into an overall system.” In the case of Iraq, it is not clear why this was the case, but in the case of Iran, these disappointments rest squarely on the shoulders of the revolutionary regime and its draconian policies against the Air Force.