There's a very interesting article in the current issue of Combat Aircraft,
Vol 7, No. 6. It's by Tom Cooper and Liam F. Devlin and titled "Iran: A
Formidable Opponent?"

I was looking at the Cooper and Devlin article again last night and wanted
to add a little more information.

They state that they obtained a 1999 US intelligence community document
through the Freedom of Information Act that indicates that the US estimated
that the Iranians had 28 active F-14s and 29 in storage at that time.
However, they said that the Iranian government has also released photos and
videos of F-14s in operation after 1999 and that by comparing tail numbers,
the authors determined that the active number of aircraft is more like 44
instead of 28.

That doesn't seem unreasonable, although I'd love to know more about how
they did this analysis. That's an awful lot of planes to count based upon
photos and videos, and my guess is that they might have had some flightline
shots that depicted a lot of F-14s in service.

They also indicate that the Iranians probably had about 135 AIM-54 Phoenix
missiles after the Iran-Iraq war, but that by the 1990s, only about 40% of
these could be considered operational. The Iranians put a lot of effort
into upgrading the missiles to extend their shelf life, however.

Reading between the lines, the authors imply that their information on the
Iranian aircraft fleet started to dry up around 2000 or so. My guess is
that they had some good contacts with the older F-14 and other pilots, and
that some of these left the country after they retired. But by the late
1990s, this was much more rare.

Like I said, it's a really interesting article. The authors have clearly
done a lot of impressive research. My only question is about how reliable
the information is.





D