“Iran studied American wars over two decades to build a system that distributes command structures, weapons, and units in such a way that bombing our capital does not affect our ability to wage war.”
With this statement, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi summarised the essence of Iran’s defensive strategy in remarks made at the outset of the latest war and the American and Israeli military targeting of command centres in Tehran. Araghchi sought to emphasise that his country’s defensive system was designed to neutralise the effect of the crushing strike on which American and Israeli military strategy had placed its bets.
What stood out in Araghchi’s remarks was his description of the Iranian strategy as “decentralised mosaic defence”, an Iranian military term that expresses the essence of its defensive doctrine. The term indicates that the central idea in Iran’s defence is not the protection of the capital, or even the senior leadership, but ensuring continuity of decision-making and combat capability even if senior commanders or vital facilities are targeted. In doing so, Araghchi openly revealed that Iran has prepared its military structure for a long conflict, one in which war is managed as prolonged attrition rather than a swift battle decided by a concentrated air strike, as America and Israel had hoped.
Blitzkrieg and Protracted War
Many states have developed their modern military strategies around the principle of rapid victory and rapid surrender. This has been one of the main principles of Israeli military doctrine since its establishment, and it has been demonstrated on more than one occasion, perhaps most clearly in the Six-Day War in June 1967. The principle of protracted war, by contrast, is the opposite of blitzkrieg. Iran has adopted this model in managing its regional conflicts since the establishment of its Islamic system, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps relies on the principle of hybrid and asymmetric warfare, pushing conflicts to last longer and raising their cost for the stronger adversary.
One practical example of the effectiveness of this strategy is the cost of producing a Shahed drone in Iran, which averages around US$35,000, while the cost to America of shooting it down reaches around US$4 million or more in interceptors and other systems. This makes time a vital factor in determining the outcome of the conflict, especially when storage capacity and the ability to endure for longer periods are added to the equation.
Hassan Abbasi is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one of those who worked to formulate the principle of protracted and unequal wars in Iranian military and strategic thought. Abbasi derives his influence from his dual role as an ideological writer within the circles of the IRGC, making him a point of connection between the strategic thinking behind asymmetric and extended conflict and the ideological narrative promoted among IRGC soldiers and those committed to the project of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the region.
One of the first to apply this doctrine in practical terms was Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the former Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Guard from 2007 to 2019, who worked to entrench it within the strategic and command mentality of the IRGC. Jafari oversaw the institutional development of the concepts of asymmetric and “mosaic” defence, with a focus on decentralised and flexible units, the use of proxies, missiles, and irregular tactics to confront technologically superior adversaries, foremost among them Israel and the United States.
Major General Mohammad Jafari was among the earliest figures to use the term “mosaic defence”, which may be defined as the organisation of IRGC units, Basij forces, and other forces into numerous semi-independent regional units. The aim is to create flexible, asymmetric, and multi-layered lines of defence capable of enduring leadership changes for any reason, and resisting occupation through guerrilla warfare and wars of attrition, enabling them to engage in a long-term conflict against a superior enemy.
The core of the mosaic doctrine, therefore, rests on two main dimensions. The first is making it difficult for any hostile power to dismantle Iran’s command system, with decentralisation becoming one of the features that ensures continuity of operations. The second is building a flexible, multi-layered defence that makes it difficult for any force to achieve total breakthroughs, through adopting a pattern of asymmetric and hybrid warfare in which Iranian regular and irregular forces are employed together within a unified flexible system.
Iran began adopting this distinctive defence model in response to the security changes and threats that followed the American intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as Tehran sensed the need to alter its security strategy to confront the possibility of its system being overthrown either through military force or through internal unrest. The development of this military doctrine thus came through interaction with the trajectory of Iraq after the rapid American overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“Iranian doctrine employs society itself as the principal line of defence against an invading force, in such a way that it can reorganise itself in a decentralised manner.”
The mosaic doctrine assumes that any invading force against Iran would possess technology and conventional capabilities far superior to those of Iran. For that reason, the concept of long-term insurgency was devised to offset the technological and military superiority of hostile forces. The doctrine works by dismantling the centralisation of war and redistributing combat functions between the regular army and semi-military forces, ensuring the continuity and durability of fighting, not only in the event that the senior leadership collapses due to its death, but even if communications and command systems are disrupted.
The importance of this doctrine lies in employing organised society itself as the principal line of defence against an invading force, so that society is capable of adapting to changing circumstances and threats and reorganising itself in a decentralised way. Accordingly, defensive tasks were distributed among military units in line with the mosaic doctrine. First comes the regular army of the republic, the Artesh, whose task is to repel the initial strike through its armoured, mechanised, and infantry units, as the conventional line of defence responsible for stabilising the front and slowing enemy advance. In the air, the air defence system, based on concealment, deception, and hiding technologies, seeks to neutralise hostile air superiority as much as possible. In general, the doctrine here seeks to compensate for the conventional imbalance in power through strategies built on disrupting the enemy’s superiority rather than confronting it directly.
Then comes the role of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij forces, whose mission is to manage the next stage of the conflict by gradually taking over the combat burden from the regular army, then managing attrition operations and irregular attacks within Iran’s geographical depth. The Basij then transforms into a local deployment force capable of decentralised fighting in cities, mountains, and rugged terrain through ambushes and strikes on supply lines.
For that reason, the Basij forces, the organisation founded by order of Khomeini himself, were placed under the Revolutionary Guard after 2007 as part of a restructuring of the military in line with this doctrine. Their units were integrated into 31 regional command centres, one for each province, granting local commanders broad powers to manage asymmetric war according to the geographical characteristics of each area. This was intended to enable ground forces to deploy rapidly in hotspots and urban areas during times of unrest as a tactical objective in the context of field battles.
“Iranian doctrine seeks to compensate for the conventional gap in the balance of power through strategies based on disrupting the enemy’s superiority rather than confronting it directly.”
After that comes the role of the naval forces, whose mission revolves around the concept of area denial and depriving the enemy of freedom of movement through the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz and key waterways, the use of swarms of fast boats, the laying of naval mines, and anti-ship missiles, turning vital passages into highly costly theatres of attrition. This is followed by the ballistic missile arsenal managed by the Revolutionary Guard as a tool of deterrence and deep strike aimed at neutralising tactical targets or deepening the scale of losses. Finally, Iran’s regional proxies, whose function is to widen the scope of the battle across multiple fronts, turning any potential confrontation into a multi-track war of attrition extending beyond Iran’s borders.
Mao’s Doctrine and People’s Protracted War
The mosaic doctrine intersects with resistance strategies that generally adopt long-term plans. It resembles what was theorised by Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Mao is regarded as one of the foremost theorists of protracted, or people’s, war as a strategy for overturning the imbalance of power through time rather than through sudden shock.
“Betting on achieving a swift and sudden victory against a stronger enemy, or surrendering to the inevitability of defeat before it, are both strategic illusions.”
Amid the Japanese invasion of China, Mao developed his thesis in lectures that were later turned into a book titled On Protracted War, published in 1938, arguing that betting on a rapid and decisive victory, or submitting to the inevitability of defeat, are both strategic illusions. Mao advanced a different conception, based on gradually exhausting the stronger adversary by prolonging the conflict and turning the enemy’s material superiority into a logistical and political burden, so that war becomes a test of will and endurance.
Mao divided his theory of protracted war into three successive stages that explain how the weaker side can turn time into a strategic tool that overturns the balance of conflict. The first is strategic defence, in which the enemy is described as militarily superior and in possession of the initiative. The weaker side therefore avoids decisive confrontations and even retreats tactically when necessary, relying on guerrilla warfare methods, building bases in rural areas, and strengthening the popular base and supply networks, so that steadfastness and the exhaustion of the adversary’s offensive power become the objective rather than defending every inch of land.
Then comes the second stage, which Mao called strategic stalemate. In this phase, the enemy’s capability erodes due to losses, extended logistical lines, and the rising political and psychological cost of war, while the areas of influence of the resistance movement expand and its operations increase in a coordinated and effective manner. The purpose of this phase is to make the enemy incapable of deciding the war in its favour. The weaker side cannot achieve a rapid victory, but it can turn war into a long-term battle of will, which was the core element in the struggle between peoples and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Mao Zedong described this stage as the longest and the most difficult.
The third stage is the strategic offensive, in which the balance of power gradually changes, and fighting units shift from guerrilla warfare to broader and more organised operations, eventually reaching a quasi-conventional pattern aimed at destroying the enemy’s principal force, seizing strategic centres, and deciding the conflict on favourable political and military terms.
Mao relied in this approach on mobilising China’s vast countryside, exhausting supply lines, and gaining time rather than territory, thereby redefining the very equation of power. Mao’s ideas did not remain confined to the Chinese experience. They became a reference point for many liberation movements in Asia and Latin America throughout the last century, most notably the Viet Cong in North Vietnam, who adopted guerrilla warfare, attacked supply lines, and exhausted American political will before gradually moving to broader operations that ended the American military presence and forced it to negotiate.
In the Cuban Revolution as well, the liberation movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara began from mountainous pockets in the Sierra Maestra, then expanded militarily and politically until it toppled the Batista regime. The Soviet war in Afghanistan also represented a model for exhausting a superpower through a long mountain war that raised the cost of occupation to an unbearable level, as did the war waged by the Taliban against American occupation forces and NATO states, which lasted nearly twenty years. Similarly, the Algerian War of Independence against French occupation forces saw the National Liberation Front combine armed struggle with popular mobilisation to wear France down militarily and politically.
Although more than half of the world’s population has lived in cities since 2007, producing a shift like asymmetric warfare through which revolutionary possibilities moved into the city, creating new patterns of urban resistance and giving the literature of asymmetric warfare and insurgency new definitions and theories, those ideas of protracted war are still invoked when explaining how a weak side or an armed group can endure against technologically superior conventional armies, and the important role that time plays in altering the balance of power.
The Enigma of the Fourth Successor
This protracted war requires a high degree of leadership flexibility. Before his death, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei directed the Iranian high command to establish a special system for naming substitute leaders during wartime. He ordered that as many as four pre-designated replacements be named for every senior military or government post to avoid a vacuum of power in the event of his assassination or the loss of communication with him. This directive was to be applied both horizontally and vertically, not limited to the top of power, to create successive layers of alternatives within every leadership tier. The Supreme Leader also granted a narrow inner circle the authority to make decisions if communication with him became impossible, to ensure continuity of the state should the worst case scenarios occur. These directives stem from the principle of “mosaic defence”.
“Before his death, Khamenei ordered that four pre designated replacements be named for every senior military or government position to avoid a vacuum of power in the event of his assassination or absence for any reason.”
Iran did not simply copy the concept of protracted war from other states and experiences. Rather, it developed it through its own experience and the existential challenges it has faced. After the fall of the Shah’s regime, the revolution imposed upon it the need to develop its security and defence doctrine, as the early years of the revolution created an open arena for a struggle of wills between the nascent regime and armed organisations, foremost among them the Mujahideen e Khalq Organisation, which possessed large military groups in Tehran and several other cities. Around three years later, the Mujahideen e Khalq declared a break with the regime and launched a campaign of assassinations against senior leaders and figures close to Ruhollah Khomeini, carrying out some bombings that resulted in the killing of around 70 Iranian officials from the regime at the time.
Those operations were launched from the perception that the new regime could be overthrown through a concentrated strike on the senior leadership. Although those operations proved that the regime’s security apparatus at the time was fragile and lacked a solid intelligence structure, it quickly learned its lesson and began building its security services and establishing the concept of decentralisation within the state system so that it would not remain centralised and dependent on only a handful of individuals, regardless of who they were. With Iran’s entry into its long war with Iraq, it acquired organisational and mobilisational strength, as well as experience in managing protracted wars.
During and after its war with Iraq, Iran built a complex system of governance suited to the nature of its revolution and ideology, and to the nature of the hostile powers confronting Tehran at the time, foremost among them the United States. The new regime placed organised revolutionary vanguards and Shiite seminaries in the position of the internal line of defence that protected it. That revolutionary vanguard took the form of a semi-military party apparatus that fed its system in a decentralised manner, distributing responsibilities in a way that allowed it to adapt to any threats seeking to uproot the command structure. In this way, a command system was formed to confront Israeli and American threats in accordance with the principle of mosaic defence.
All of these factors provide Tehran with composite effectiveness in its conflict with Washington and enable it to balance the American war effort despite the latter’s technological superiority, while opening room for diplomatic and economic manoeuvring throughout the war. This war does not appear likely to be the swift one envisioned in Washington and Tel Aviv. Rather, it risks turning into a protracted conflict for which Iran has prepared itself, and from which the passing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though it caused shock on the first day of the war, is unlikely to deter it, as Iran quickly absorbed that shock thanks to its deeply rooted defensive doctrine, one designed from the outset to withstand precisely this kind of rupture.
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