Iran's military-industrial complex?

I saw this EurasiaNet report on Iran's Revolutionary Guard getting more politically active. This sentence raised a red flag for me:

Prior to taking on a higher political profile, the Revolutionary Guards established itself as an economic force in the country, launching a vast array of financial and economic enterprises.

The report's conclusions seem too conservative to me. With economic clout, political clout soon follows. Combined with the prestige from their nuclear program, the Revolutionary Guard has evolved into a military-industrial complex. This would not be unprecedented. China's People's Liberation Army followed a similar route of branching into business and emerging as a military-industrial complex in the 1980s and onward.

Napoleon is said to have stated that an army marches on its stomach. Today, that logistical stomach in peacetime is the capacity to fund its operations. The military-industrial complex is one solution to this funding problem; when successful, it's less of a drain of government coffers. This model is likely being replicated in other countries as well.