Iran has initiated its long-delayed transition from legacy-era aviation to a fused, multi-domain aerial doctrine, structured around Chinese systems integration and Russian high-capability airframes. With the Su-35 tranche capped due to Russian wartime production constraints, Tehran is shifting toward a scalable acquisition of J-10CE multirole fighters, recalibrating its force structure into a dual-axis fleet: Su-35s for strategic deterrence and high-altitude interception, and J-10CEs as the operational backbone for regional air superiority and saturation coverage. The J-10CE’s inclusion brings critical uplifts, AESA radar arrays, PL-15 BVR missile integration, modular EW compatibility, and sovereign BeiDou time-sync routing, delivered through China’s full-spectrum export ecosystem. This system includes depot-level sustainment, airframe lifecycle support, secure comms channels, and C2 interoperability across SCO-aligned nodes. The procurement pipeline is lubricated by oil-for-airframe barter, reactivated after Washington’s June 24 exemption for Chinese purchases of Iranian crude, marking a quiet end to dollar-clearing bottlenecks in bilateral arms trade. This layered architecture now fuses Russian kinetic depth, Chinese production throughput, and Iranian drone-swarm doctrine into a single operational lattice. Su-35s provide long-range AWACS denial and strategic reach; J-10CEs handle multirole sorties, point defense, and tempo-based attrition cycles; Iranian UAVs fill the ISR, EW, and loitering munition domains with modular redundancy. The result is a sovereign, C4ISR-synced air grid that no longer merely contests Western-dominated skies, it rewrites the framework entirely, rendering previous assumptions about Iranian vulnerability functionally obsolete.