Iranian research years ago pointed to development of the strike drones that have been lighting up air defences across the Gulf and, by threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, holding the world economy hostage. It was in open-source data long before the first Shahed drone crossed the Gulf – or the skies of Ukraine.
ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker, built on such open-source data and launched in 2023, has consistently pointed to Iran as a country investing heavily in a narrow set of defence-relevant technologies.
Research trends are strategic indicators yet are rarely treated as such. The challenge for Western governments, industry and academia is to monitor them systematically, before research results coalesce into military capability.
The Critical Technology Tracker, updated in March with global 2025 academic publications, monitors research output in 74 technologies drawn from priority lists published by Australia, the United States, Canada, China, South Korea and others. Across the technologies, Iran ranks 11th. For 21 of these technologies, it’s in the top 10.
Its overall ranking is below Japan’s but above France’s, with a research profile that reflects concentrated investments in a narrow set of priorities, shaped by decades of sanctions and broad exclusion from Western research networks.
Defence, energy and materials are where Iran has placed its bets. It ranks among the world’s top research performers in smart materials, air-independent propulsion for submarines, advanced composite materials, coatings and nanoscale materials. This is just the sort of domestic technological effort needed by a sanctions-pressured military-industrial base. The results have been visible for some time over Ukraine and now in the skies and waters of the Gulf.
Two documents have defined the strategy. Iran’s National Comprehensive Scientific Roadmap, published in 2011, places technologies in a hierarchy of priorities: energy production, aerospace, nano and micro technologies and information community technologies feature at the top; quantum computing and robotics in the middle; medical engineering and climate change at the bottom. The Comprehensive Science and Technology Document in the Defence and Security Domain (CSTD), published in 2021, sharpened the focus on technologies relevant to defence applications, listing advanced materials, nanotechnology, propulsion systems and uncrewed systems as national technology priorities.
Iran’s research performance data follows this hierarchy with a clear pattern. Quantum technologies, for example, are a clear area of relative weakness in Iran’s overall research performance. The country ranks 13th globally in quantum sensors, 21st in computing and 22nd in communications. Iran also ranks 23rd in advanced robotics.
The CSTD also called explicitly for ‘a mutual spillover of technology between the military and civilian sectors.’ Publication data suggests this was already well underway before the document appeared. Using a large language model to classify research papers by their probability of having defence applications, our analysis finds that the dual-use category – general-purpose research with a credible defence pathway – is precisely what has surged in Iran’s collaborations with China, the country’s second largest collaborator after the US, since the mid-2010s.
In 2018, researchers affiliated with Sharif University of Technology – an institution that’s closely linked to Iran’s military and missile programs and is on numerous national sanction lists – published work on low-cost GPS receiver architectures with interference rejection capability. A separate 2018 paper by researchers affiliated with the Iran University of Science and Technology investigated GPS spoofing detection and mitigation methods.
Much of the innovation in Shahed drones lies in assembling off-the-shelf foreign components into a lethal, cost-effective weapon. But some components are Iranian designed, including the Nasir GPS navigation module, which is tied to a special kind of antenna designed to pick up satellite-navigation signals while rejecting spoofing and noise jamming. The Iranian research mirrors that capability.
Iran ranks fifth in nanomaterials research in the Critical Technology Tracker, with high-impact publication output at roughly 85 percent of the US level in 2025. One area where this intersects with defence is ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) – a class of material that achieves far greater tensile strength than conventional mixes, hardening structures against earthquakes and high-energy impacts – such as impacts by penetrator bombs. Iran has long-standing expertise in UHPC. More recent nanomaterials research is further improving characteristics of concrete, with work on additives that can improve strength-to-weight ratios, shield against electromagnetic interference, or make the material self-sensing – where the material’s electrical conductivity changes under different loads, which can be used to monitor structural health.
The fortification of Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow and Natanz reflects decades of investment in hardened construction. Whether that hardening proved sufficient against massive ordnance penetrator strikes during the 12-Day War of June 2025 is a separate question – but the underlying research base ensures Iran can continue improving its buried and fortified infrastructure.
In 2024 Iran showed a design for an upgraded Fateh-class submarine with air-independent propulsion (AIP) for prolonged loitering underwater without exposing itself to detection by running diesel electricity generation. The result is greater endurance and stealth than in a pure diesel-electric submarine – and it could present a severe threat in the Persian Gulf and nearby coastal waters.
The AIP-equipped Fateh design has not been confirmed as operational, but research has been showing that Iran’s interest lies in that direction: the country ranks third globally in AIP research. If the Shahed shows what happens when Iranian research matures into a fielded system, AIP submarines in the Hormuz Strait what may be next.
Iran published its technology priorities. Its research followed, and weapons followed the research. Published research is one of the few strategic indicators that moves before capability does: weapons appear in the field after years of development, but the knowledge base that produces them accumulates openly long before.
There is always a gap between research excellence and fielded technology, but the two correlate. Research output sends a signal of what a country is prioritising and the technical capabilities it is amassing in a particular field. This shouldn’t be ignored.