As President Donald Trump warns Iran against using mines to threaten oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy’s purpose-built minesweepers are sitting stateside thousands of miles away with no plans to put them to use while the war rages on. As gas prices in the U.S. continued to skyrocket, Trump on Tuesday took to Truth Social to demand that Tehran “immediately” remove any mines placed in the vital seaway and to do so “forthwith” lest the Iranian military suffer “consequences … at a level never seen before.” That warning came after multiple news outlets reported Iran had begun mining the strait, a narrow waterway that is the only passage from the Persian Gulf into open ocean. He also threatened to use drone strikes to “permanently eliminate any boat or ship attempting to mine the Hormuz Strait” and boasted of having done so against 10 Iranian “inactive mine-laying boats” in a separate post several minutes later.
While they may produce most of the components for the drones Iran probably kept some production parts homegrown to ensure Russia pays their licensing fees. That doesn’t mean Russia can’t make their entirely homegrown production line from beginning to end but that would take time when most of the production line was set up on Iran and they could purchase those components for their production run. Even if that isn’t a factor in a shooting war you probably want the maximum production of weapons needed to continue shooting.
I think assuming they operate their economy like the US does has a high probability of leading to committing grave errors
I’m not saying they do, but to assume that Iran transferred all data on how to produce a Shahed drone without some kind of ensurance that they will keep getting paid out in some form and not just forgotten the moment being friends with Iran is inconvenient for Russia is a graver error to commit. They may not be being paid in money but before this current bombing campaign I’m sure Russia was transferring the minimum they could get away with to Iran without hampering their own technologly transfer for the drones. All dictatorial governments (call them small coalition governments for more accuracy for this discussion as all brands of autocracy have their own rules but rely on a small group of people to run the government with loyalty to the ruler being paramount) have a corruption issue, be it Russia with their crony Oligarchy or Iran who has a specific group of people who handle the money for the country and can never be legally prosecuted for money disappearing from the government coffers. If we can know for sure that both of those governments have corruption issues we can also surmise that pocketing as much money as they can is going to be a part of their governments standard operating procedure and to avoid being robbed if they have a licensing agreement they will have physical impedements to avoid the licensing infringement, and they are not the only people to do this the F-35 for all exports except for 1 have a similar scheme in place.