Iran is the only major power with two formally separate navies operating in the same waters under conflicting doctrines. The Artesh Navy, the regular force inherited from the imperial period, conducts conventional operations. The IRGC Navy, the revolutionary parallel structure, conducts asymmetric ones. The arrangement was politically expedient at its creation. Forty years on, it produces a force that is internally incoherent and externally legible.

The Artesh Navy fields frigates, submarines, and a thin blue-water capability. It deploys to the Indian Ocean, calls at port in Oman and India, and stages occasional joint exercises with Russia and China. Its officer corps is professionally trained and its institutional memory predates the revolution. Its doctrine is recognizably that of a small conventional navy: presence, deterrence, force protection. It is the Iran that wants to be treated as a normal regional power with normal naval interests.