>>507380227I mean, that's being a third world muslim nation in a nutshell. When you're working from a position of an incredibly middling talent pool, with an anemic economy under sanctions and your opponent is a relatively highly competent, high tech, high productivity per capita economy with mandatory service and tied into global trade? You're fucked.
Even the North Korean model of starving every facet of the nation in order to prop up a huge military wouldn't have worked, because they don't share a land border. The single saving grace of the Kim dynasty is that they can roll conventional tube artillery into range of Seoul which allows them to punch above their weight in terms of the threat they represent. The geography of the middle east means any conflict between Iran and Israel is by its nature going to always be an air and missile contest, and being a shitter economy means you're going to lose that contest if your opponent even bothers trying to race.
The people who seriously thought Iran was a credible threat to Israel without atomic warheads were always deeply huffing copium.