Across an eight-year war and a thousand-mile front, Iran and Iraq mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops, fought with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, and flew hundreds of combat aircraft and helicopters—an archetypal crucible of large-scale combat that killed roughly half a million people and scarred cities on both sides. The war began in September 1980, when Baghdad abrogated the 1975 Algiers Agreement and invaded after months of border clashes, betting that Iran’s postrevolution turmoil would yield quick concessions. By 1987, Iraq fielded about 800,000 troops, more than 4,500 tanks, and over 500 fighters, while Iran mustered roughly 850,000 troops, about 1,000 tanks, and only dozens of serviceable fighters. The 1988 campaign—culminating in Iraq’s swift recapture of the al-Faw Peninsula with an assault force of roughly 100,000 and heavy armor—set the conditions for Tehran’s acceptance of a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 598. Yet despite its scale, the war remains relatively underrepresented among studies of large-scale combat operations (LSCO), particularly when compared with the 1973 Yom Kippur War or 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. It should not be. This war demonstrated how internal political dynamics, external alignments, and wartime finance determine how states mobilize and employ forces, how they escalate, and how they assess and posture after the guns fall silent. Iraq’s leadership, backed by supportive foreign governments and ample foreign loans, built a quality-first force with foreign equipment, training, and advisers; Iran, short on credit but rich in people, mobilized through parallel revolutionary institutions that converted manpower into endurance. The same three forces also shape today’s wars: They help explain why Russia and Ukraine mobilize and escalate so differently, and they offer the right lens for thinking about the next large-scale war—whether in Europe or the Indo-Pacific.

Mobilization and Employment: How Politics and Credit Shape the Ways States Fight

A personalist autocrat who rose by purge, Saddam Hussein launched a war of choice in September 1980 and then managed it to project strength without losing domestic control. He avoided a hasty, society-wide call-up and staged mobilization—about 30,000 conscripts a year from an annual cohort of around 135,000 until 1985, then roughly 70,000 a year through the war’s end. Simultaneously, he financed modernization on credit. After Iranian strikes destroyed Iraq’s oil terminals at Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya, Iraqi oil revenue fell from around $26 billion in 1980 to $7 billion in 1983. However, Gulf monarchies and the Soviet Union filled Iraq’s wartime funding gap with roughly $110 billion in loans and supplier credits—nearly three-quarters of Iraq’s war financing—letting Baghdad buy at scale: T-72 tanks and BMP infantry fighting vehicles; MiG and Su strike fighters; a helicopter fleet that dwarfed Iran’s; and the training, spares, and advisers to keep them combat-ready. On the ground, Iraq fought mostly on the defensive for much of the war behind layered, combined-arms belts east of Basra—minefields, wire, berms, and water obstacles tied to radar-guided artillery, attack helicopters, and chemical fires that bled repeated Iranian assaults at Shalamcheh and across the Basra approaches. By 1988, the compounding effects of Iraq’s maturing force, its sustained credit-backed kit and training, and Iran’s mounting casualties and revenue strain flipped the ledger. In the Tawakalna offensive of 1988, Iraq retook the critical al-Faw Peninsula in thirty-six hours, shattered Iranian lodgments along the southern front, and recovered all Iraqi territory, setting the conditions for Tehran’s acceptance of a ceasefire. According to most scholarly estimates, Iran’s losses exceeded Iraq’s—often cited as approximately 500,000 Iranian dead versus 180,000 Iraqi dead, with total wounded well above one million—underscoring how Baghdad’s credit-enabled, quality-first approach paired with defense in depth could impose attrition until conditions favored decisive counteroffensives.

On the other side of the war, Tehran’s revolutionary leaders distrusted the prerevolution army and built parallel power in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) while mobilizing the Basij, a paramilitary militia, to convert population into staying power. Iran’s international isolation and thin credit reinforced that choice. Tehran largely self-financed the war with oil export revenue that rose from about $10.5 billion in 1980 to roughly $21.5 billion in 1983, then fluctuated with prices and interdiction. Cash in hand—rather than foreign loans—funded eclectic procurement from China, North Korea, Libya, and Syria, with clandestine Western-origin spares when opportunities appeared. The regime matched this resource picture with scale: From an initial force near 290,000, Iran added 100,000–120,000 troops annually through 1984, then about 70,000 a year as mobilization tapered, reaching a force of around 850,000 by the war’s end. That surge let Iran flood sectors of the front, often massing a force ratio of two-to-one or better against Iraqi defenses. Basij volunteers attacked in waves to breach minefields and wire, identify seams, and enable IRGC and army formations to exploit them. The model produced early operational returns—Khorramshahr’s liberation in 1982, the seizure of Majnoon Island in 1984, and deep lodgments that threatened Kirkuk in the north and Basra and access to the Persian Gulf in the south. Buoyed by those gains, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rejected ceasefire proposals for years, only to see the approach exact mounting costs in set-piece battles such as Karbala-5 and, by 1988, lose momentum as casualties rose and oil revenues tightened. Iran’s path illustrates the thesis: Internal political dynamics (parallel institutions), external relations (isolation with a narrow supplier set), and financing (cash rather than credit) combined to favor a quantity-first mobilization and employment model—one that could generate pressure and endurance, but at a steep human price that ultimately narrowed strategic options.

Considering Iraq during the war alongside Ukraine today further illustrates how internal politics, external alignments, and financing channels drive a quality-first mobilization and employment model. Saddam’s personalist regime avoided early mass conscription to preserve domestic control, then substituted credit for manpower—leveraging loans and supplier financing to import training-intensive platforms, maintenance capacity, and advisers. The force he built fought largely from prepared belts and executed carefully sequenced combined arms blows once maturity and readiness caught up. Ukraine, though democratic and much better aligned with the West, faces a parallel triad: political incentives that privilege casualty discipline and economic continuity; an external coalition willing to underwrite sophisticated systems, training pipelines, and sustainment; and financing that arrives as grants, loans, and equipment rather than vast mobilizable labor. The result is a mobilization approach that supplements selective call-ups with accelerated quality—NATO-standard training, integrated air defense, precision-strike networks, and limited numbers of modern armored formations—and an employment concept that emphasizes coordinated, high-payoff operations over mass attrition. The cases differ—Kyiv’s partners and industrial on-ramp are far deeper than Baghdad’s ever were—but the causal chain is the same: Regime imperatives at home, patrons abroad, and how a state pays the recurring costs of war determine whether it builds primarily for quality or quantity, and these factors shape how it actually fights.

Escalation: How Politics, International Alignment, and Finance Shape Escalation Pathways

The same three forces that determined how Iran and Iraq mobilized and employed their armies—internal political dynamics, external alignments, and wartime finance—also shaped how each chose to escalate. In strategic studies, vertical escalation raises the intensity of violence by introducing more destructive means or striking more valuable targets, while horizontal escalation widens the scope of conflict across geographies or domains. In this war, Baghdad went vertical; Tehran went horizontal.

The same forces that shaped Iraq’s mobilization—personalist politics, permissive external alignments, and ample wartime credit—also pushed Baghdad to escalate vertically, raising the intensity of coercion against Iran’s cities and economic lifelines. First, beginning in 1984 Saddam initiated the war of the cities, a sustained campaign of air and then ballistic-missile strikes against major urban centers designed to signal resolve at home and cause pain in Iran. By late February and March 1988, Iraq was firing extended-range al-Husayn Scud missiles in concentrated salvos—about 189 missiles in six weeks—at Tehran, Qom, and Isfahan, yet the bombardment did not crack civilian will. This choice depended on external suppliers and financing: Soviet Scuds, Iraqi modifications, and a logistics system underwritten by Gulf and European credit. Second, that same year Iraq launched the tanker war, a protracted interdiction of Iran’s oil economy that concentrated strikes on Iran’s oil terminals at Kharg Island and later Sirri and Larak. With French help—five Super Étendard strike aircraft on loan and large stocks of French AM39 Exocet missiles—Iraqi pilots hit Iranian oil vessels and terminals repeatedly; by early 1988 Lloyd’s tallied 375 damaged vessels. Third, Iraq normalized large-scale chemical weapons use to blunt Iranian mass assaults and terrorize Kurdish areas—drawing UN Security Council Resolution 612’s condemnation but little punitive follow-through. Declassified reporting indicates US intelligence also flowed to Baghdad late in the war despite awareness of Iraqi chemical employment, reinforcing Saddam’s expectation of limited international penalty.

The same three forces—internal politics, external alignments, and wartime finance—also steered Tehran toward horizontal escalation. Tehran’s revolutionary leadership—split between the IRGC and the regular army, isolated from major-power patrons, and reliant on cash-based financing—favored deniable, distributed, and comparatively inexpensive instruments. First, Iran exploited hostage diplomacy in Lebanon. Lebanese Hezbollah, backed by Tehran’s security services, kidnapped dozens of Westerners between 1984 and 1986, including Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley. The abductions pried open an arms-for-hostages channel that delivered 504 TOW antitank missiles via Israel in 1985 and a direct US sale of 1,000 TOWs in February 1986, plus HAWK air defense parts—significant and cost-effective gains for Iran that later became a scandal for Washington, known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Second, Iran used bombings to extract further international concessions. In Beirut on October 23, 1983, an Iran-backed network executed twin truck-bomb attacks that killed 241 US service members and 58 French paratroopers, precipitating the withdrawal of both contingents from the Multinational Force in Lebanon within months. In France, cells linked to Hezbollah conducted a sustained campaign of eleven bombings in 1985–86, killing roughly twenty and wounding about 255—while allied groups seized French nationals in Beirut. Over time Paris eased pressure on Tehran, expelled Iranian opposition figures, and moved to resolve the Eurodif dispute—concessions Iran achieved at low financial cost. Third, Tehran expanded the war’s geography through Iraq’s north. The IRGC leveraged Iraqi Kurdish insurgents and built the Badr formation from Iraqi Shia volunteers, forcing Baghdad to commit and recommit formations to the northern Kurdistan region rather than the decisive southern front near Basra. These moves tracked directly to Iran’s constraints and advantages: They leveraged ideological mobilization and proxy networks, minimized capital outlays that isolation made hard to replace, and produced discrete political and military effects—from targeted arms inflows to coalition withdrawals—without the platform costs of vertical escalation.

The Russia-Ukraine War reflects the same vertical/horizontal escalation logic seen in the Iran-Iraq War. Ukraine has largely pursued vertical escalation, particularly after Western capitals judged that Moscow was unlikely to widen the war into NATO countries and loosened restrictions on deeper strikes. Kyiv then employed long-range drones and missiles against refineries, airbases, logistics hubs, and Black Sea Fleet targets in Crimea. That choice followed the same three drivers: internal incentives to conserve manpower and sustain public resolve, external alignment that supplied training, intelligence, and strike enablers, and financing—aid and loans—that supported a technology-heavy approach. As in Iraq’s case, politics, patrons, and how the war is financed narrowed the feasible escalation menu and made a vertical strategy both permissible and effective.

Postwar Posture: Iraq’s Overreach Versus Iran’s Hedging

The same three forces—internal politics, external alignments, and wartime finance—also shaped Saddam Hussein’s postwar choice to invade Kuwait. Iraq ended 1988 on offense after the al-Faw reversal and a string of summer counterblows, and Saddam’s personalist system equated retrenchment with weakness; a swollen army and triumphalist narrative cast him as the Arab bulwark that had held back revolutionary Iran. At the same time, Iraq’s balance sheet was dire: Baghdad had financed the war largely on credit, owing about $37 billion to Gulf states, including roughly $14 billion to Kuwait—a creditor Saddam now accused of overproducing oil, depressing prices, and even pilfering the Rumaila oil field. Coercing a write-off looked, to Saddam, like strategy—threaten one’s largest creditor (Kuwait) and posture against the next (Saudi Arabia) to transform debt into leverage. He also read the external environment as permissive. In July 1990, US Ambassador April Glaspie told him, according to the Iraqi transcript cited at the time, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” a line he could plausibly have read as a green light, however unintended. Within weeks he crossed the border. The road from al-Faw’s liberation to August 2, 1990 thus ran through the same channels that had shaped Iraq’s wartime behavior: a regime that prized demonstrations of strength, patrons and great-power ambiguity he believed he could game, and a debt overhang that made coercion appear cheaper than repayment.

Tehran’s postwar impulse, by contrast, was to build staying power. The three forces of internal politics, external alignments, and wartime finance also shaped Iran’s choices, but toward hedging rather than overreach. The war entrenched the IRGC as a permanent pillar alongside the army and canonized the “Sacred Defense” narrative, which valorized endurance and self-reliance. Isolated from major-power patrons and constrained by sanctions and cash-flow volatility, Tehran invested in capabilities it could control, afford, and scale: a ballistic-missile enterprise, an early and expanding drone industry seeded in the 1980s and matured for mass production, and a proxy network—later branded the “Axis of Resistance”—able to impose costs far from Iran’s borders at modest financial outlay. These choices also supported a nuclear hedge—capability short of a declared weapon—to deter existential threats without inviting the costs of overt weaponization. In short, internal regime incentives favored parallel security institutions and an endurance doctrine; external isolation rewarded asymmetric tools over prestige platforms; and finance favored cost-effective coercion and deniable partners over capital-intensive forces. The postwar posture that followed—missiles, drones, proxies, and a hedge—flows directly from that triad.

The Iran-Iraq War is a compelling case study on large-scale combat operations. It shows how internal politics, external alignments, and wartime finance determine mobilization and employment, escalation choices, and postwar judgments. Those drivers yielded Iraq’s credit-enabled, quality-first force and vertical coercion and Iran’s cash-financed, quantity-first mobilization and horizontal pressure, ending in overreach in Baghdad and hedging in Tehran. The mechanics are not relics; they usefully help decode dynamics in the Russia-Ukraine War and offer a disciplined lens to consider future large-scale combat operations, from Europe to the Indo-Pacific. Analytically, the payoff is a disciplined frame anchored in that triad. When thinking about current or future large-scale combat scenarios the salient questions follow: What must the combatants’ political systems demonstrate domestically? Which external actors will underwrite, constrain, or veto combatants’ choices? By what means—cash revenues, credit, or industrial capacity—will they finance recurring combat power? Read in this light, the Iran-Iraq War merits a place in military education and planning—not to revisit 1988, but to refine indicators, wargaming assumptions, and decision points for current and emerging conflicts.

Major Harrison (Brandon) Morgan is a US Army foreign area officer aligned to the Middle East and North Africa and a former Modern War Institute nonresident fellow.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Amir Ali Javadian