The United States may be winning battles in its conflict with Iran, but without grasping Tehran's core military strategy, it risks losing the war, warns a new analysis from a prominent strategist.
Harlan Ullman, senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and co-author of the upcoming book Who Thinks Best Wins with former UK defense chief Lord David Richards, argues that Washington's leadership has failed to fully comprehend Iran's mosaic defense doctrine. This decentralized system was designed specifically to neutralize America's overwhelming conventional superiority.
Iran's leadership long ago accepted a stark reality: in a head-to-head conventional fight with the U.S. or Israel, its outdated air force and minimal navy would be obliterated. As President Trump has boasted, Iran cannot project sustained power beyond its borders. So, beginning in 2005, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' strategy center, led by Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari and strategist Hassan Abbasi, set out to solve this dilemma. The lesson from the second Iraq War was clear: Saddam's centralized command was eviscerated by American precision strikes. Iran needed a different approach.
The answer was a radical decentralization. By 2008, the IRGC had restructured itself into 31 separate provincial commands, each empowered to operate with pre-delegated authority, assuming senior leadership in Tehran might be killed or neutralized. The theory was simple: a network with no single point of failure cannot be defeated by one decisive blow—or even sustained attacks.
This mosaic rests on three pillars, forged by the bitter experience of the Iran-Iraq War when Iranian cities were bombarded with no means of retaliation. First, a dispersed and hardened arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles—now enhanced by drones—provides strike capability independent of air power. Second, a regional network of allied forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, including Hezbollah and Hamas, extends Iran's strategic reach and complicates any enemy's calculus. These are not mere proxies but essential components of the defense. Third, and most critically, the command architecture relies on redundant, geographically spread nodes with overlapping authority, ensuring that decapitation strikes—like the February 28 attack that killed much of Iran's leadership—have minimal impact.
Ullman contends that the U.S. may have naively believed that killing Iran's supreme leader and senior commanders would trigger immediate regime collapse. Instead, as seen during Operation Epic Fury, provincial and local commands simply activated under their pre-delegated authority. This explains why a local commander in the Strait of Hormuz may have independently attacked a merchant vessel without central authorization. The strategy is winning through endurance: making the conflict so costly, unpredictable, and prolonged that American domestic support collapses, just as in Vietnam.
The mosaic defense is not flawless. Delegating authority undermines central control, raising risks of miscalculation, unwanted escalation, and difficulty in implementing ceasefires or negotiations. Yet so far, despite its military inferiority, Iran is fighting the U.S. to a draw. As the U.S. continues pounding Iranian command centers, the best strategy to defeat this decentralized system remains elusive. More bombing alone, Ullman argues, does not appear to be the answer.
For Washington, the path to victory requires a fundamental shift in thinking. As Ullman and Richards emphasize in their forthcoming book, leaders who make critical decisions without understanding why past strategies succeeded or failed are doomed to repeat those failures. Unless the U.S. fully grasps the nature of Iran's mosaic defense, it cannot prevail.
