When three senior US officials told the Washington Post that Russia was providing Iran with sensitive information, including the precise locations of US warships and aircraft operating throughout the Middle East, they revealed more than a tactical alliance. They laid out the architecture of a new type of war. A war without fronts. A war that is fought not with tanks or missiles, but with radar beams, satellite transmissions and encrypted coordinates. Today, in the Gulf, the battlefield is the electromagnetic spectrum, and both sides fight, above all, to blind the other.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly denied that Moscow was sharing such intelligence with Iran during a call with US President Donald Trump. Denial, however, changes little. Russia has received Iranian drones and ammunition for its war in Ukraine. He has watched the United States supply Ukraine with intelligence used to attack Russian positions, including reportedly locations near Putin’s residences. Moscow’s calculations are not difficult to read. Intelligence is a currency. Putin is just spending it.
Signs as weapons
As former CIA officer Bruce Riedel once observed, in modern warfare, coordinates are often more valuable than bullets. Whoever knows where the enemy is, wins. That axiom is now being applied in real time across the Gulf. Russia’s intelligence channel has allowed Iran to locate American and Israeli assets with a precision that Tehran could not achieve on its own. Iran operates only a limited constellation of military reconnaissance satellites, totally insufficient to track fast-moving naval assets in open waters. Russia does not share that limitation. Its advanced air surveillance network, including the Kanopus-V satellite, redesignated “Khayyam” following its transfer to Iranian operational use, provides Tehran with optical and radar imagery 24 hours a day. For Iran, this is not a complement to its military capabilities. It is the nervous system of his precision strike doctrine.
The drone that crashed into a US military installation in Kuwait, killing six US service members, did not find its target by chance. Pentagon officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that several recent Iranian strikes hit facilities directly associated with U.S. operations, targets whose coordinates do not appear on any public map. The origin is not difficult to trace.
China’s silent hand
Beijing’s role is more muted. But it is no less transcendental. China has spent years reshaping Iran’s electronic warfare landscape: exporting advanced radar systems, transitioning Iranian military navigation from US GPS to China’s encrypted BeiDou-3 constellation, and leveraging its growing satellite network to support signals intelligence and terrain mapping for Iranian forces. Retired Israeli Air Force Brigadier General Amos Yadlin once said it clearly: every second counts. If Iran can reduce the minutes of detection and targeting, it will change the balance in the skies. China has done more than cut minutes. It has reshaped the entire chain of death.
The YLC-8B anti-stealth radar, a UHF-band system supplied by China, uses low-frequency waves designed to reduce the effectiveness of radar-absorbing coatings on US stealth aircraft. The B-21 Raider and F-35C were designed to be invisible. Compared to a YLC-8B, they are considerably less so. And now, Reuters reports that Iran is close to a deal to acquire 50 CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles, the export variant of China’s YJ-12, capable of traveling at Mach 3 and hovering in the sea at altitudes that compress a ship’s reaction window to seconds. Military analysts call them “aircraft carrier killers.” The USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R Ford are currently operating within their commitment framework.
Counterattacks between the United States and Israel
The United States and Israel are not passive. They are hunting. American and Israeli intelligence teams have been tracking the movements of Iranian leaders, mapping command nodes of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and, in the initial phase of Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, destroying Iranian radar infrastructure with a speed and precision that exposed how fragile Tehran’s defensive integration really was. As former Israeli air force commander Major General Eitan Ben-Eliyahu has pointed out, destroying a radar is not just about disabling a machine; blind the enemy. In the first hours of the war, they erased many of them.
However, IRGC spokesman Ali Mohammad Naeini claimed that Iran had destroyed nearly 10 advanced US radar systems across the region, a statement that, while partially accurate, offers a partial explanation for how Iranian missiles hit targets in Israel, Gulf capitals and beyond. When US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked directly about Russian intelligence assistance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he responded with studied brevity: “We’re tracking everything.” This is a reassurance or a warning. Possibly both.
A new balance of power
For decades, the Gulf was a theater of overwhelming technological dominance between the United States and Israel. That domain has not disappeared. But it has been eroded, quietly and deliberately, by years of Chinese hardware transfers and Russian intelligence sharing. As a top US military commander recently acknowledged, signals are the new bullets: whoever controls the spectrum controls the fight. Neither party decisively controls it. That, in itself, is a profound change.
This fight also has a precedent, although not comforting. In 1991, coalition forces jammed Iraqi radar networks and fooled Saddam Hussein’s defenses so thoroughly that American planes attacked with near impunity. Electronic countermeasures were decisive. Baghdad fought blindly and lost. Iran has closely studied that war for three decades. He has studied all subsequent conflicts in which a technologically inferior force was dismantled from the air. Russia’s satellite transmissions and China’s radar architecture are, in part, Iran’s response to those lessons. Tehran is determined not to become the next Baghdad.
There is a deeper strategic logic at play that goes beyond Iran’s immediate survival. China is not arming Tehran out of ideological solidarity. It’s treating the conflict like a live-fire laboratory. Each potential CM-302 engagement against a U.S. carrier strike group can generate targeting and interception data that Beijing’s military planners will study exhaustively, refining doctrine for the only theater that really matters to China: Taiwan. Russia, meanwhile, has seen Western sanctions and Ukrainian intelligence attacks sap its own military credibility. Allowing Iran to bleed US forces and deplete its interceptor stockpile in the Gulf is not merely transactional. It is a form of strategic debt collection.
The implications are not abstract. The Gulf is becoming the first theater where electronic warfare can be more decisive than conventional firepower. Alliances are not being redefined through the deployment of troops or the signing of treaties, but through intelligence flows and satellite constellations. Russia and China are not sending divisions to Tehran’s aid. They are doing something more lasting: they are teaching Iran to see.
Radar beams are now as deadly as missiles. Intelligence is the decisive currency. In this war of signals, Iran is fighting for a parity it has never had and, for the first time, it has partners capable of providing it. For the United States and Israel, the challenge is no longer simply to outgun Tehran. It is to ensure that when the trigger is pulled, Iran is the one firing blindly.
The question is no longer whether the Gulf will erupt. He has already done it. The question is who will be able to see clearly when the smoke finally clears.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
