cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/noncredibledefense/p/1946213/imagine
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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I got curious what Iran's national budget actually looks like and theres not much good information there's a Wikipedia article with no hard numbers.
The cited sources also seem to lack hard numbers. Here's one of them. As a funny aside half of them are apparently dated by an Islamic calendar, so these budgets are from the year 1402. Iran definitely acts like it's still the year 1402.
We know from the Wikipedia article they raised the retirement age by 10 years, increased government and military pay, instated road tolls, and slashed the road budget at the same time. They raised their military budget by the equivalent of $5B USD (against a GDP of $375B) while raising electricity, natural gas, and water prices by 35% to pay for it.
To do a last bit of comparative math, the USA's total military budget is about 3.33% of GDP, while Iran's 2025 budget raised military spending by about 1.3% of GDP from whatever it was before. And again no hard numbers, but Iran's direct government and military spending is very large, apparently it's a driver of inflation.
So, actually, I think this take is basically correct.
Idk, seems like if they spent less on military they’d be quite a lot less capable of fighting off the current invasions.
It would be great if we could all universally stop spending that money on military at all, though
I knew I'd hear this take. And I don't buy it, in fact I think its very ignorant. No effort post with links this time since its been discussed to death. Iran's current regime has been incredibly belligerent since they overthrow the Shah in 1979 with the help of communists, and seized total power by then killing all of the communists. In the 45 years since they've been shouting "death to america" and after two straight generations of this, only now are at they having the war with america their grandparents wanted. Maybe great great great grandparents since they marry 9 year old girls. That's one of the "rights" they started a civil war for.
Plus they get in lots of smaller conflicts with their neighbors and they killed tens of thousands of civilians last time they had big protests (the equivalent of just pulling out an artillery regiment on BLM).
This is a military government which uses conflicts to stay in power and always needs a conflict.
I mean that's just the classic realist security paradox, right? The Iranian regime feels, not without reason, like they need to have a lot of military options to keep themselves safe against both internal and external threats. Those options include missile forces, the nuclear program, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and a variety of regional proxies that can act in their interest and keep their regional adversaries from stabilizing and forming a real threat. However, having all those different security apparatuses makes other nations that have to interact with them (either because they're also in the region, or they rely on the Strait of Hormuz, or they would also die in a nuclear apocalypse) more likely to feel the need to increase their own security apparatus, which in turn increases the threat they can pose to Iran. Meanwhile the fact that all this investment is going into the military means that there are fewer resources available and less inclination to try and solve problems by other means, making it increasingly likely that any conflict is going to be resolved kinetically, which in turn further reinforces the need for all that military investment.