An Army with Two Missions

And three bureaucracies with one commander in chief

Every morning the 413,000 members of Iran's armed forces recite a pledge of allegiance to Xoda, Shah, Mihan (Persian for God, Shah and Fatherland). Significantly, in this tripartite loyalty oath, King comes before country. Iran's army, navy and increasingly sophisticated air force have two missions. One is to defend a nation ringed by potential enemies. The other is to protect the person, prestige and power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who once observed, "In this country, if the King is not the commander in chief of the armed forces, anything can happen."

As commander in chief, the Shah has created an impressive military force that one Pentagon expert sums up as "effective, still on a learning curve with some new weapons and, above all, loyal." Apart from a few army units that crossed the Persian Gulf in 1974 to help the Sultanate of Oman put down a rebellion by the Dhofor rebels, or served with United Nations peacekeeping forces, Iran's military has not been tested in combat, but it is awesomely equipped. In the past two decades, Iran has bought $36 billion in weaponry, most of it from Britain and the U.S. The total includes 2,200 tanks, 400 jet fighters, nearly 30 naval vessels, as well as air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. Iran, moreover, is one of the few nations in the world to have fleet of military hover craft. Although the latest crisis forced the Shah to delay or cancel $7 billion in current purchases, about $12 billion worth of equipment is in the delivery pipeline, including 160 advanced F-16 U.S. jet fighters. (Ironically, the army had not stockpiled grenades, tear gas and other weapons to use against demonstrators and had to order emergency supplies from the U.S.)

Iranian officials insist that this imposing military machine is needed to protect the Persian Gulf and its international oil fleets, and to fight off any possible Soviet invasion of Iran, until, they hope, reinforcements from the West could arrive. The generals see the current dissent as part of a grand Communist design, linked to Russian moves on the Horn of Africa and in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, a lot of the most sophisticated equipment, including British-made Chieftain tanks and F-4 Phantoms, was deployed around the capital rather than along the Soviet border, obviously to help protect the Shah.

In a new book called Iran: The Illusion of Power, British Military Expert Robert Graham argues that possession of a large and varied force is an advantage to the Shah rather than a potential threat to his continuing rule. "A large military establishment," Graham writes, "enables the Shah to fragment individual power bases, making it much more difficult for dissident elements to mount a cohesive opposition." A graduate of Tehran's Military College, the Shah has involved himself deeply in the promotion of all officers, even at middle-grade levels. Liaison between the army, navy and air force, which were separated into three military bureaucracies in 1955, is handled at the top by a royal military staff. That makes it much more difficult for officers of the three services to get together--and possibly conspire against their commander in chief. Beyond that, leaders have been promoted as much for loyalty as ability. General Azhari, 61, the brusque, husky chief of staff who took over as Premier two weeks ago, graduated first in his class from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. But Azhari is also a trusted officer who formerly held the ultimate loyalty post, commander of the 10,000-man imperial guard.

The military is rewarded for its devotion. Officers' pay ranges from $2,000 a month for lieutenants to a high of $70,000 a year for generals. In addition, officers receive modern housing with servants, vacation quarters, and PX privileges that enable them to buy hard-to-find luxury items without paying normally high taxes on them. Privates on long-term enlistments receive $400 a month and sergeants $1,000; conscripts, who constitute only 20% of the force, get the equivalent of a dollar a day. (Iran's civilian per capita income: $2,200 a year.) Barracks are modern, food is good and furloughs are generous; the army even provides its troops with their own mosques and movie theaters.

There may be under-the-table perquisites as well for favored officers. In 1976 Rear Admiral Ramzi Abbas Ata'i was found guilty of embezzling $25 million and fined $3.7 million. Some Iranians argue that his case was an exception and that top officers by and large are honest. Critics insist that graft is common and condoned, and that the Shah was forced to prosecute Ata'i only because his activities, which included transporting duty-free luxury goods from the Emirate of Dubai aboard navy ships, had become a general scandal.

So far, the Shah's attention to his armed forces has paid off. In the current crisis, the loyalty of his officers is unquestioned. The army's highly trained paratroop units, which include large numbers of Turks, Kurds and Baluchis, from provinces where the Shah is considered a father figure, have not hesitated to fire into unruly crowds when ordered to do so. Explained one paratroop captain to TIME Correspondent Brelis last week: "You can think of us having the same loyalty to the Shah that American officers have to the President of the U.S. Maybe if our recruits came in off the streets, with the mood of strikes and rebellion this past year, we'd be worried about fragging, the way it happened in Viet Nam with American captains and lieutenants getting killed off by their own men. But our troops aren't in a foreign place like Viet Nam. They're on their own soil, and they believe that what they are doing is protecting their own interests."

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