ABSTRACT
Riza Shah’s determination to create a modern army in Iran has generally been seen as the centre-piece of the entire state-building project of the period, the needs of military modernization determining both the scope and the character of much of the wider programme of reform and development. Yet the massive effort undertaken in the two decades from 1921 to 1941 to build a new professional army organized along European lines, capable of asserting Iran’s regional ambitions, actually produced a corps which was militarily ineffective, structurally weak, deeply politicized, and expensive beyond the capacity of the economy to sustain. Conscription, for example, produced a large army, though not a strong or efficient one, while the vast amounts of money spent on acquiring the most up-to-date weaponry from abroad resulted in a distortion of military priorities and led to unrealistic and complacent assessments of the army’s strength. The Shah himself, whose increasingly arbitrary rule had brought about his own isolation, simultaneously relied upon, yet mortally feared his own army and its increasingly disillusioned officer corps. These paradoxes had both military and political consequences, most starkly illustrated by the inability of either the high command or the Shah himself to offer any coherent response to the Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran in 1941.
