Shortly after the U.S.-Israeli launch of Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion on Feb. 28 wiped out key Iranian leadership figures, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sent out a defiant tweet.
“Bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to conduct war,” he wrote on X. “Decentralized Mosaic Defense enables us to decide when—and how—war will end.”
That defence, known as Iran’s “mosaic defence” doctrine, was a military strategy developed, in part, as a response to U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“[Iran] realized that when the U.S. goes to war, the first thing it targets is command and control,” said Michael Connell, an expert in the armed forces of Iran and research scientist at CNA, a Washington DC-based not-for-profit research and analysis organization.
The Iranians, thinking defensively, wanted to make sure that if they ever got in a war with the U.S., the Americans wouldn’t be able to eliminate their military capabilities by taking out their central command and control, Connell said.
The idea, then, was to imbue all of the provincial military units with degrees of autonomy so they would be able to launch their own offensive in case the leadership was decapitated.
In this current war, it’s been Israel that has been systematically targeting and eliminating Iran’s key military and security leaders. So far, that has included: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; Ali Shamkhani, head of National Defence Council; Mohammad Pakpour, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh; and Sayyid Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces
Just this week, Israel killed three others: Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib; Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s all-volunteer Basij; and top Iranian security official Ali Larijani.
But Iran continues to launch missiles, raising questions as to whether its mosaic defence doctrine has enabled the country to fight on despite the decapitation of its top leadership.
What is the mosaic defence strategy?
The lead author of the plan was General Mohammad Jafari, then director of the IRGC’s Centre for Strategy, who was later appointed commander of the IRGC.
The idea was to restructure the command and control architecture into a system of 31 separate commands — one for the city of Tehran and 30 for each of Iran’s provinces, Connell wrote back in a 2010 report for the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Iran’s state television broadcast a regime threat to attack oil infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Iran says its oil in South Pars was struck on Wednesday, and confirmed a top intelligence official has been killed.
Connell, in an interview with CBC News, said that Iran decided to decentralize command and control and give lower-echelon commanders some latitude to respond to events on the ground if they couldn’t maintain contact with Tehran and the central authorities.
Nicholas Carl, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on Middle Eastern political and security issues, said this meant each of these provincial units could wage their own “guerilla defence against the invaders, rather than waiting for top-down direction.”
How is the doctrine playing out in this war?
Connell said the operation has been degrading Iran’s ability to salvo ballistic missiles — in other words, they aren’t able fire a lot at one time in order to overwhelm their enemy — yet the Iranians are still managing to launch strikes periodically.
“They’re not huge salvos, so it suggests their capabilities are being degraded, but it also suggests that we haven’t eliminated their ability to conduct those strikes by taking out command and control,” Connell said.
“So my guess is they’re probably delegating, based on the operations I’ve seen, command and control to lower-echelon commanders to conduct those strikes.”
He said while those commanders have latitude to operate, it’s not ideal.
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Ideally, they’d be co-ordinating operations across the board, and everybody in their military would be aware of what everybody else is doing, and it would all be centrally managed.
“If you’re pushing them to operate in a disjointed fashion, then that degrades their capabilities,” Connell said.
Heather Williams, a senior policy researcher at RAND and former deputy national intelligence officer for Iran at the National Intelligence Council, said she believes that the mosaic defence doctrine is likely helping the IRGC weather some of the decapitation strikes against military leadership.
Iran was able to launch retaliatory strikes with missiles immediately after the strike on Feb. 28 that killed the supreme leader, Williams said, because the local IRGC commanders have a lot of authority and resources to directly respond.
“They don’t have to wait for directions,” she said.
Carl said it’s difficult to determine how the doctrine had helped Iran because it’s unknown how bad the disruptions have been to their command and control.
“That the Iranian missile forces have sustained their strikes every day since the war began may be itself a testament to the effectiveness of the mosaic defence,” Carl said. “However … at times, the Iranian strikes have appeared a bit frenetic.”
What are the ramifacations of deaths of key figures?
Despite the defence doctrine, Williams said she believes the losses of key Iranian leaders does have a collective impact.
“Israel’s targeting of these leaders is both depriving the regime of its ruling class, and will give pause to other figures who seek prominent roles,” she said.
Williams said that the weakening of the regime by eliminating some of these leadership figures does, in many ways, strengthen the Iranian population’s hand in relation to the regime. U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Mininster Benjamin Netanyahu have both suggested their military efforts will weaken the regime and give the Iranian people an opportunity to rise up.
“I don’t know if it strengthens them enough for them to mount a challenge,” Williams said.
Michael A. Horowitz, a geopolitical and security analyst, told NBC News that the targeted killings will also likely hamper the effectiveness of Iran’s internal operations.
“They can scramble command, slow decision-making, force successors into hiding and demoralize both leadership and foot soldiers alike,” he said.
Connell, the expert in Iran’s armed forces from CNA, said there’s been impact, just not decisive impact.
“It’s not like if you take out the head of the Basijm the Basij collapses.”
It may really depend on the leader, Connell said, explaining that some are less essential to the war effort.
He said there isn’t any one individual who is so essential to the system — the linchpin that holds everything together.
Williams said Larajani, for example, was one of the Islamic republic’s founding fathers and was very relevant to crafting national security strategy, “but not necessarily someone who is handing out military orders to soldiers.”
“I wouldn’t put Larijani especially as someone who is part of that [military defence] doctrine,” she said.
Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence, told the New York Times that decapitation has its limitations.
“I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface in the ability of Iran to find replacements that can take over for the people that have been decapitated,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t think decapitation is an important tool,” Citrinowicz said. “But we can’t build a strategy only on that.”