According to a CNN report, U.S. and NATO-provided military assistance to Ukraine is being transferred to Iran, prompting experts to express concerns about the security of these operations.
“Russia has been capturing some of the US and NATO-provided weapons and equipment left on the battlefield in Ukraine and sending them to Iran, where the US believes Tehran will try to reverse-engineer the systems,” four individuals with knowledge of the situation told CNN.
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“Over the last year, US, NATO and other Western officials have seen several instances of Russian forces seizing smaller, shoulder-fired weapons equipment including Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft systems that Ukrainian forces have at times been forced to leave behind on the battlefield,” CNN added.
“In many of those cases, Russia has then flown the equipment to Iran to dismantle and analyze, likely so the Iranian military can attempt to make their own version of the weapons,” the report continued. “Russia believes that continuing to provide captured Western weapons to Iran will incentivize Tehran to maintain its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
The tactics of cutting-edge military weapons are widely believed to be being decoded by Iranian officials, and analysts suspect they may be trying to replicate them for their own defensive capabilities.
“Iran has demonstrated the capability to reverse-engineer US weapons in the past,” stated Jonathan Lord, senior fellow and head of the Center for a New American Security’s Middle East security program. “They reverse-engineered the TOW anti-tank guided missile, creating a near-perfect replica they called the Toophan, and have since proliferated it to the Houthis and Hezbollah. Iran could do the same with a Stinger, which could threaten both civil and military aviation throughout the region. A reverse-engineered Javelin could be used by Hamas or Hezbollah to threaten an Israeli Merkava tank. In the hands of Iran’s proxies, these weapons pose a real threat to Israel’s conventional military forces.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz questioned Robert Storch, the inspector general of the Pentagon, at a congressional hearing about whether the Department of Defense was following the law on the tracking of weapons it had sent to Ukraine, but Storch had no answers.
