Iran
Artesh
Iran's conventional armed forces, inherited from the imperial military and constitutionally tasked with defending the country's territory — one of three pillars answering to the Supreme Leader, not a service of a unified military.
Coverage · Iran–Gulf
Context, not targeting. This atlas describes structure and history. It deliberately excludes current locations, live strength, unit movements and anything operationally sensitive — the content model has no fields for them. Branch depth reflects what can be established from public sources, not the size, capability or importance of a force: a thin branch means a state publishes little, and record counts are never a measure of strength.
Force StructureThe full command tree for each side — who sits under whom, with the subordination of every record stated and graded.FormationsEvery formation as a searchable list, when you know the unit you are looking for rather than where it sits.
Current state
What this atlas holds
Records assessed as of 2026-10
How the forces on each side are organised — formations, lineage and subordination, never locations or strength.
- Published records83As of 2026-10Formations index
- Reviewed profiles82As of 2026-10Formations indexFull or partial profiles that have passed source review.
- Formations30As of 2026-10Formations indexRecords typed as a formation or a special unit; services, commands and groupings are counted above.
- Documented equipment edges33As of 2026-10Formations indexTyped equipment associations graded documented — never quantities.
- Newest status date2026-10As of 2026-10Formations indexThe most recent status-as-of date any record in this module carries.
The trees The 20 trees this module publishes across 3 sides, as selectable objects. Each plate opens the structure beneath that record; the count on a record is a count of published records, never a measure of strength.Interrogate Iran–Gulf in Explore
Iran
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
The military created to defend the revolution rather than the territory — a second armed force with its own ground, naval and aerospace services, holding the missile programme and the external portfolio, and answering to the Supreme Leader in parallel with the Artesh.
Iran
Law Enforcement Command
Iran's national police and internal-security force — the third of the three branches answering to the Supreme Leader, and the pillar most accounts of the Iranian military leave out entirely.
Iran
Iranian Armed Forces General Staff
The body between the Supreme Leader and Iran's three military pillars — a general staff whose mandate is planning, coordination and integration, and which this atlas deliberately does not draw as the commander of the forces it coordinates.
Iran
Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics
The executive-branch ministry that administers, funds and procures for all of Iran's armed forces and owns the defence-industrial conglomerates — the organisation that makes the missiles the Guard fires, and the one whose designations carry most of the arms sanctions.
Gulf Arab states
Saudi Armed Forces
The Ministry of Defence's five services — land, air, naval, air defence and strategic missile forces — and only one half of the Saudi military structure, which runs a second armed force under a separate ministry.
Gulf Arab states
Saudi Arabian National Guard
A full armed force under its own Ministry of National Guard, outside the Ministry of Defence entirely — the second pillar of a deliberately divided Saudi military structure, not another service of the first.
Gulf Arab states
UAE Armed Forces
A single unified federal military rather than seven emirate forces — and, since February 2026, the armed forces of the most heavily attacked state in the Gulf.
Gulf Arab states
Qatar Armed Forces
A small national military in a state whose security rests mainly on hosting others — and which nonetheless owns the air-defence function protecting the most structurally exposed energy infrastructure in the system.
Gulf Arab states
Bahrain Defence Force
The smallest national military of the six, in the state that hosts the American naval command for the region — an arrangement in which the host's own forces are not the main military fact about the country.
Gulf Arab states
Kuwait Armed Forces
The military of a state that has been invaded once inside living memory and has organised its security around external guarantees ever since — named in Resolution 2817 among the Gulf states attacked in the current war.
Gulf Arab states
Sultan's Armed Forces
The military of the one Gulf state that is a Hormuz co-riparian and not a party to anyone's camp — a force whose relevance here is the strait it borders and the neutrality its government has spent decades protecting.
Gulf Arab states
GCC Unified Military Command
A navigation grouping and an institution, not a command over forces: the GCC's joint military body in Riyadh, whose member states' forces each remain under their own national command — a distinction the current war has made visible.
External powers
US Central Command
The American combatant command whose area covers Iran and the Gulf — the institution that has conducted the United States' war since February 2026, and the correct US command for this system rather than any other theatre's.
External powers
Combined Maritime Forces
A 47-nation maritime partnership headquartered in Bahrain, running five combined task forces against illicit non-state activity — commanded by the American Fifth Fleet commander, and not a party to the war he is also fighting.
External powers
International Maritime Security Construct
The Hormuz-specific coalition — formed in July 2019 after the tanker attacks of that summer, headquartered in Bahrain, with an operational arm called Coalition Task Force Sentinel and a remit that, unlike the wider maritime coalition's, names the strait and the threat to merchant shipping directly.
External powers
EUNAVFOR ASPIDES
The European Union's defensive naval operation for freedom of navigation, launched in February 2024 against the Houthi campaign on shipping — mandated to February 2027, widened in 2026 to monitor the Strait of Hormuz, and the only military structure in this module that answers to Brussels.
External powers
Qatar–Türkiye Combined Joint Force Command
The Turkish military presence in Qatar — a joint force command established under the 2014 defence agreement and expanded during the 2017 blockade, the only standing non-Western external force in a Gulf Cooperation Council state, and the structure Türkiye's Gulf role rested on before Makkah.
External powers
Israel Defense Forces
Israel's unified military — a single force with no separate national guard or revolutionary parallel, and the organisation that opened both the June 2025 war and the war that began in February 2026.
External powers
Houthi armed forces
The military of the Houthi authority in Sanaa — an insurgent movement that inherited most of the Yemeni state's arsenal in 2014 and has since become a conventionalised force with its own missile, drone and coastal components, organised in seven military regions, and the one non-state actor in this module able to close a chokepoint.
How to read this atlasRecord states, subordination grades and lineage — and the dated structural changes this module's records and corrections carry
How to read this atlas
Structure. Each side is a set of trees: state military, interior forces, and browsing groups. A record marked “Grouping · not a command” exists only so related organisations can be found together — its members do not share a command, and each states its real parent institution.
Record states. A full profile has passed source review. A stub is an honest structural placeholder — name, place in the tree, broad role, and a dated status — awaiting research. Records that cannot yet meet even that threshold are held internally and do not appear on the site at all.
Subordination grades. Parent links are graded:confirmed, reported, disputed,historical, or unknown. Where a current parent cannot be verified — as with brigades amid Ukraine's rolling corps reform — the record says unknown rather than inventing precision.
Lineage, not amnesia. Reorganised, merged or disbanded organisations keep their records, marked with dated predecessor and successor links — Wagner's absorption after 2023 and the Donetsk and Luhansk corps are carried this way, never as if unchanged.
Every record carries a status as of date for its claims and a separate reviewed date for editorial checks — a review never silently refreshes a status date.
Recent structural changes
Dated changes the records in this module state about themselves, and the corrections the public log records against this atlas — newest first.
2026-10-05Correction
A PARENTAGE STATED AS SETTLED, AND A MANDATE STATED AS FACT. The Force Atlas drew the Central Headquarters under the General Staff as a confirmed parent, and its record said the headquarters was mandated to command joint operations in war and was activated for the June 2025 war. The US Defense Intelligence Agency's 2019 report says it was separated from the General Staff in 2016 as a standing command, and the decree of 10 August 2026 orders the two merged; no Iranian statute setting out its authority has been found. The parent link is now graded disputed and the mandate is stated as a description, not a fact. The Watch question's account of two credible sources in disagreement is reframed: both readings rested largely on one compiled source, and the record is incomplete rather than contested.
Full history on the corrections log.
Evidence and grading
- Subordination
- Every parent link is graded by the record itself: confirmed, reported, disputed, historical or unknown. Where a current parent cannot be verified the record says unknown rather than inventing precision.
- Record state
- A full profile has passed source review; a partial profile is under review; a stub is a structural placeholder — name, place in the tree, broad role and a dated status — awaiting research. Records below that threshold are not published at all.
- Confidence
- How well established Vigil considers this assessment to be. It is not a measure of how severe the situation is.