It's the Persian Empire, a titanic object, with an advanced civilization, quality scientific culture and a highly educated population (.... in the Persian-Azeri

It's the Persian Empire, a titanic object, with an advanced civilization, quality scientific culture and a highly educated population (.... in the Persian-Azeri core, not the brutalized ethnic periphery). There are sanctions, but relations with Russia and China make up for the few inputs that the sheer extent of the Persian empire cannot yield. (Israel is a bit over 1% its size and mostly intractable desert but has more convenient external supply.) The ingenuity is kind of astonishing, there is something of a mad febrile energy to it. Thus Houthi and Hamas mostly did not need external supply chains for rocketry etc.: a complete industrial chain could be devised in Iran and deployed on site. Part of it seems to be that a chief objective of design is minimizing what seems to us as inevitable external supply chain dependencies. The product is indeed largely replication of external industry: as I understand, they seem to have done a lot of reverse engineering of enemy drones. But none of these can bee too much like the shahed, I think, as is evidenced by the fact that Uncle Sam has reverse engineered versions in production and appearing in the Gulf now. Similarly, I suppose, the Chinese AIs that to some extent mirror US AIs, but on the cheap and with way less computing power, will be replicated in US.