On 3 January 2020, when Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad Airport, many viewed the event as an exceptional moment, a single escalation in the long shadow war between Iran and its adversaries. What was not fully understood at the time was that Soleimani’s assassination did not mark the end of an era, but the beginning of a new phase in which targeting Iranian military commanders shifted from exception to doctrine.
The same pattern resurfaced with the assassination of Brigadier General Razi Mousavi in December 2023 after an Israeli strike on his residence in the Sayyidah Zaynab district of Damascus. Then, in April 2024, Israeli F-35 aircraft targeted an annex building attached to the Iranian embassy in Damascus’ Mezzeh district, killing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, widely believed to be responsible for the Syria and Lebanon portfolio, along with his deputy Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi and five additional Revolutionary Guard officers.
What initially appeared to be isolated assassinations gradually evolved into something broader and more systematic. During the June 2025 war, the strikes moved beyond hunting individuals and began targeting entire layers of Iran’s command structure. Within the opening hours of the Israeli assault, several of Iran’s most senior military figures were killed, including Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Salami, Chief of Staff Mohammad Bagheri, aerospace commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh, considered one of the central architects of Iran’s missile programme, and Khatam al Anbiya Central Headquarters commander Gholam Ali Rashid.
Within just six years, from the assassination of Soleimani to the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic lost successive generations of its military and ideological leadership.
The Collapse of a Founding Generation
Eight months later, the same pattern repeated itself during the February 2026 US-Israeli war against Iran. The attacks targeted the new Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, and Defence Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani. This time, however, the campaign extended beyond military leadership and reached the top of the political system itself with the assassination of Khamenei.
According to opposition outlet Iran International, approximately 4,700 Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and police personnel were killed during the conflict. Yet the significance of the losses lies less in the exact figures and more in what they represent.
Over six years, Iran lost not only senior commanders, but entire layers of leadership stretching from the founding generation born out of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and shaped during the Iran-Iraq War, to the second generation trained under them and largely aligned with their strategic worldview.
The consequences of this gradual depletion extend far beyond a temporary leadership vacuum. The founding generation of the Revolutionary Guard was never merely a professional military class that could be replaced through ordinary bureaucratic succession. It emerged as the guardian of a revolutionary doctrine forged through war, isolation, and ideological struggle.
Researcher Annie Tracy Samuel argued in her study The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War that the Revolutionary Guard did not interpret that war simply as a military conflict, but as the foundational experience that shaped its institutional identity and its understanding of its role inside the Iranian state.
The war transformed the Guard from a fragmented revolutionary force into a cohesive institution built around narratives of sacrifice, legitimacy, survival, and permanent threat.
The Birth of Asymmetric Warfare
This interpretation aligns with conclusions reached by the RAND Corporation in its study The Rise of the Pasdaran, which found that commanders of that generation were bound together through shared battlefield experience rather than administrative hierarchy alone.
Their relationship was built through war, memory, and blood. As a result, they viewed the Islamic Republic not as a negotiable political system, but as the truest embodiment of the revolution itself.
From this environment emerged the doctrine of asymmetric warfare, a strategy based on confronting stronger enemies by bypassing their strengths and exploiting their vulnerabilities.
According to Jawad Bahgat and Anoushiravan Ehteshami in their book Defending Iran, the roots of this doctrine can be traced to Iran’s severe international isolation during the Iran-Iraq War, when sanctions deprived Tehran of access to advanced military technology while confronting a heavily armed adversary.
The battles of Khorramshahr became the defining moment of this doctrine. The city, located in south western Iran near the Iraqi border, fell during the opening days of the Iran-Iraq War before Iran recaptured it during Operation Beit ol Moqaddas in May 1982.
Due to the scale of destruction and casualties suffered there, Iranians began referring to the city as “Khuninshahr”, meaning “the bloody city”, instead of its original name, which literally translates as “the city of joy”.
According to Samuel, it was in Khorramshahr that the foundations of Iran’s modern asymmetric warfare culture took shape. Iranian fighters learned the necessity of engaging a better armed enemy under near impossible conditions, relying on sacrifice and tactical innovation to compensate for their lack of firepower.
From Revolutionary Icons to Emergency Successors
This history explains why commanders of that generation possessed symbolic authority that extended far beyond their official positions.
Soleimani was not simply the commander of the Quds Force. He became Iran’s unofficial political representative across multiple regional theatres, and Khamenei granted him the exceptional title of “the living martyr of the revolution”.
Likewise, Hajizadeh became the public face of Iran’s missile arsenal, while Bagheri and Rashid functioned as the principal strategic planners within Iran’s military establishment.
The generation that replaced them was not dramatically younger, but occupied a very different position within the institutional narrative. Many were deputies elevated through necessity rather than charisma.
For example, Esmail Qaani inherited Soleimani’s position without inheriting his influence or regional relationships. Salami also rose through the ranks without possessing the same symbolic weight as his predecessors.
Nevertheless, this generation participated in operations that the previous leadership never experienced directly. During the “True Promise” missile strikes against Israel in 2024 and throughout the June 2025 war, Iran shifted from indirect deterrence through proxies to launching direct attacks from Iranian territory against Israel for the first time in the history of the conflict.
This shift was not necessarily the result of deliberate long term planning. Rather, it emerged under pressure from a wave of assassinations that struck the core of Iran’s military structure and forced the successor generation into a new strategic reality.
The Return of the Old Guard
Ironically, the leadership vacuum has not produced an entirely new generation. Instead, Iran has partially returned to older figures tied directly to the founding era.
In March 2026, amid the aftermath of the US-Israeli strikes, Ahmad Vahidi was appointed commander of the Revolutionary Guard, replacing Pakpour.
Vahidi has been part of the Revolutionary Guard since its earliest years. During the 1980s, he held sensitive military and intelligence positions before leading the Quds Force between 1988 and 1997, eventually handing the role to Soleimani.
In this sense, Vahidi does not represent a break from the founding generation, but rather a direct continuation of it. He emerged from the same historical moment that shaped the Guard’s ideological and military doctrine, including its networks of intelligence operations, proxy forces, and transnational influence.
What distinguishes Vahidi from many previous commanders is that he is not purely military. He has alternated between military institutions and civilian government roles, serving as Defence Minister under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and later as Interior Minister under Ebrahim Raisi.
This dual experience gives him insight into both the military and administrative structures of the Iranian state. As Gulf analyst Ali Alfoneh described him, Vahidi is a highly capable bureaucrat suited to managing something far larger than a conventional military organisation.
Iran-Contra and Strategic Experience
Vahidi’s significance also stems from his long familiarity with both the United States and Israel.
During the mid 1980s, he participated in secret communications between Iranian representatives and intermediaries connected to the administration of Ronald Reagan during what later became known as the Iran-Contra affair.
The scandal involved covert US facilitation of arms shipments to Iran despite sanctions, with part of the proceeds redirected to support Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s left wing government.
According to Alfoneh, Vahidi’s involvement in these channels provided him with rare insight into American and Israeli strategic thinking and negotiation methods, experience that has become increasingly valuable as Iran re-enters direct confrontation with both states.
A Collective Leadership Structure
Vahidi does not operate alone. In the opening weeks of his leadership, a cohesive network of senior commanders emerged around him, what Alfoneh describes as an informal collective leadership responsible for shaping red lines and managing escalation.
Among the most prominent figures is Ali Akbar Ahmadian, former commander of the Revolutionary Guard Navy and former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
Ahmadian appeared publicly within Iran’s negotiating delegation in Islamabad alongside Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
The visible presence of Revolutionary Guard figures inside diplomatic negotiations signals that Iran’s military establishment is no longer merely supervising diplomacy from behind the scenes, but actively participating in shaping it.
Ahmadian’s rise carries additional significance. Beyond commanding naval forces, he led the Revolutionary Guard’s Strategic Studies Centre for many years and played a central role in developing Iran’s asymmetric warfare doctrine and its application in Iraq.
According to analyst Daniel Brumberg, Ahmadian is considered “purely Khamenei”, meaning he belongs to the camp that views the Islamic Revolution not as a flexible political system open to reinterpretation, but as a doctrine that must be defended against reformists, conservatives, and hardliners alike.
From Strategic Patience to Pre-emptive Deterrence
The transformation inside Iran’s leadership has coincided with a deeper shift in the philosophy of war itself.
On 6 January 2026, weeks before the latest conflict, Iran’s Defence Council issued a brief statement declaring that Iran no longer considered itself bound to respond only after being attacked, and that it would treat “objective signs of threat” as part of its security equation.
Although the statement avoided explicitly using the term “pre-emptive strike”, it effectively opened the door to such a doctrine.
This marked the end of the era of “strategic patience” established by Khamenei over decades, during which Iranian doctrine centred on absorbing the first strike before responding through missiles, proxy networks, and prolonged attrition.
Iranian affairs specialist Hamid رضا Azizi argued that the statement represented a major shift because Iran had never previously adopted a clear pre-emptive military doctrine. Historically, its military discourse focused on defence and retaliatory strikes rather than initiating confrontation.
The declaration therefore represented not merely a linguistic adjustment, but a transition from deterrence through patience to deterrence through initiative.
Weaponising Geography
This doctrinal shift quickly became operational.
Compared to June 2025, Iran today appears more aggressive both rhetorically and strategically. Tehran now openly embraces the expanded use of regional missile systems, drones, cyber attacks, and strikes against energy infrastructure.
At the same time, Iran appears to have replaced its increasingly vulnerable nuclear leverage with a more practical geoeconomic strategy.
Following American strikes on the nuclear facilities of Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, Tehran appeared to conclude that its nuclear programme had become less an effective bargaining tool and more an exposed target.
As a result, Iran shifted toward what could be described as the weaponisation of geography through threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and disrupt global oil markets.
The significance of this strategy lies in the fact that it does not require full scale military confrontation. Instead, it exploits Iran’s geographic position to raise the economic cost of war not only for its enemies, but for the entire global economy.
Mosaic Defence and the Nuclear Threshold
At the same time, Tehran activated its so called “mosaic defence” doctrine, designed to ensure regime survival in the event of a decapitation strike.
Developed over the past two decades, this doctrine divides Iran into 32 independent regional commands, each with its own headquarters, communications systems, weapons stockpiles, and intelligence capabilities.
The purpose is to ensure that the state can continue functioning even if contact with the central leadership is severed. Regime survival therefore no longer depends entirely on the safety of the capital or the uninterrupted functioning of senior leadership.
This system also includes what is known as the “Fourth Successor Protocol”, which pre selects between three and seven replacements for every sensitive position to prevent paralysis in the chain of command.
Although this doctrine prevented systemic collapse after the March 2026 assassinations, it also carries serious risks. The more autonomous regional commanders become, the weaker the political leadership’s ability to tightly control escalation.
Some operations are now reportedly being conducted through local initiative by regional units that may not be fully controllable in real time.
The doctrine itself was formally adopted by the Revolutionary Guard in 2005 under Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari before being reorganised in 2008. It was designed as a lesson drawn from the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where excessive centralisation was seen as a key vulnerability.
The Nuclear Question Returns
Perhaps the most important development accompanying the rise of Iran’s new leadership is the reopening of the nuclear threshold debate.
For two decades, Iran’s official position relied heavily on Khamenei’s religious ruling prohibiting weapons of mass destruction. Following his assassination, however, the central question is no longer whether Iran can develop nuclear weapons, but what now prevents it from doing so.
Khamenei’s death removed the most important religious and political barrier to nuclear weaponisation. His fatwa was tied more closely to his personal authority than to a legally binding state framework.
With hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium already available, the distance between technical capability and political decision appears shorter than ever.
This creates a profound strategic contradiction. American and Israeli strikes were reportedly intended to weaken what they considered Iran’s hardline leadership and potentially open the door to a more pragmatic ruling class.
Yet according to analyst and Iran and the Bomb author Sina Azodi, the opposite may now be happening.
Azodi argued that one of the reasons Iran previously avoided pursuing nuclear weapons was fear of Israeli and American military strikes. But once those strikes occurred regardless, the calculation fundamentally changed.
In that sense, the military campaign intended to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon may have ultimately handed nuclear advocates their strongest argument yet.
A More Flexible and More Dangerous Leadership
Iran’s emerging wartime doctrine suggests that the current leadership generation approaches instruments of power with greater flexibility and fewer restraints than its predecessors.
Rather than merely inheriting missiles, proxy networks, decentralised command structures, and nuclear capabilities, this generation is redefining how they are used, shifting from delayed retaliation toward early pressure, initiative, and escalation management.
This raises a deeper question than simply tracking changes inside Iran’s leadership hierarchy:
Did the attempt to break Iran’s command structure unintentionally produce a leadership that is more rigid, less restrained, and more willing to escalate than the one it sought to destroy?
Based on the current structure of Iran’s leadership and the doctrine now forming around it, the answer increasingly appears to be yes.
