‘Mosaic defense’: Iran’s strategy for resisting the United States and Israel
Faced with the sustained targeting of its top leadership, the Iranian regime is waging war through a decentralized military command
Seyed Abbas Araghchi is Iran’s foreign minister and one of the few visible faces of the Iranian regime. On March 1, the day after the United States and Israel launched their coordinated offensive against Iran’s military and political apparatus, he said that Iran had had two decades to “study the defeats of the U.S. military” and learn from these lessons.
The airstrikes, Araghchi continued, would have no impact on Iran’s ability to wage war wherever Tehran wished. To make his case, the Iranian diplomat used the expression “decentralized mosaic defense.”
After the deaths of at least 11 senior Iranian officials with military responsibilities in nearly six weeks, and after enduring daily bombardment of its missile and drone batteries, naval forces, and defense industry, Iran still retains the capacity to continue attacking Israel and its Gulf neighbors. Araghchi was not far off the mark.
However, there was a clear propagandistic component to the foreign minister’s statement. Iran has been hit hard. The military campaign led by the U.S. expeditionary force in the Middle East (55,000 service members) and its Israeli ally has been devastating: according to data from U.S. Central Command, they have carried out more than 13,000 strikes on Iranian targets, including ports and vessels used to enforce the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Admiral Brad Cooper, who oversees operations in the region, said on Thursday that the United States has wiped out 40 years of Iranian investment in its defense. Evidence of such extensive damage is scarce beyond photographs and videos uploaded online by the military. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in their most recent figures published on April 1, put the number of airstrikes by their aircraft since February 28 at 10,000.
For the past 20 years, as Araghchi noted, Iran has been preparing to confront its historic enemy, the United States, without capitulating. It was in 2005, after analyzing and drawing lessons from the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), that General Mohammad Jafari — then one of the senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, the regime’s defensive pillar alongside the regular army — developed the so‑called “mosaic defense strategy,” that is, a fragmented defense strategy.
Michael Connell, a U.S. researcher and former intelligence officer who is now an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses — and one of the leading experts on Iran’s military structure and this strategy — has described it as follows: a command architecture divided into 31 separate commands, one for the city of Tehran and 30 for each of Iran’s provinces.
Connell wrote in a 2010 article that the goal was to strengthen unit cohesion at the local level and give commanders greater freedom to respond to potential threats — in effect, to build an army of small armies with their own autonomy. “Tacitly acknowledging it has little chance of winning a conventional force-on-force conflict,” Connell explained, “Iran has opted for deterrence-based model of attrition warfare that raises an opponent’s risks and costs, rather than reducing its own. The goal is to inflict a psychological defeat that inhibits an enemy’s willingness to fight.”
This is the war of attrition Iran has pursued since February 28, whether by striking neighboring countries and Israel or by closing off the world’s most important hydrocarbon transit route.
In detail, this strategy seeks to decentralize decision‑making in order to preserve capabilities in case the top military leadership is eliminated. And that is precisely what has happened after the long series of targeted killings carried out by Israel. Alongside Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the victims include Ali Larijani, head of the National Security Council; Ali Shamkhani, chief of the National Defense Council; Aziz Nasirzadeh, defense minister; Mohammad Pakpour, commander‑in‑chief of the Revolutionary Guard; Gholamreza Soleimani, top leader of the Basij militia; Esmaeil Khatib, minister of intelligence; and Seyed Majid Jademi, head of Intelligence for the Revolutionary Guard.
This series of blows did not prevent Iran from launching 17 ballistic missiles and 35 drones at Emirati territory on Wednesday, just hours after the ceasefire came into effect. Kuwait was next, targeted by unmanned explosive‑laden vehicles. Last week, moreover, U.S. aviation confirmed that despite efforts to eliminate Iran’s surface‑to‑air missile batteries since the start of Operation Epic Fury — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has boasted about the freedom with which U.S. fighter jets were flying — their aircraft were still within range of enemy projectiles after the downing of an F‑15, which triggered a race against the clock to rescue, ultimately successfully, two U.S. service members.
The errors made by Iranian projectiles during these 40 days of conflict are also clear evidence of the decentralized command structure designed two decades ago. Midway through last month, Iranian officials told a group of journalists that Tehran was not behind several of the attacks on civilian infrastructure in Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The order had not come from a central authority. Araghchi put it this way in an interview with Al Jazeera: “Our military units are now, in fact, independent and somewhat isolated, and they are acting based on general instructions given to them in advance.”
When asked now about what he so aptly described 15 years ago, Michael Connell, a contributor to the Middle East Institute, notes in an email: “The strength of command and control at the provincial level provides tangible evidence that the Revolutionary Guard, at least, has been operating in accordance with the established concept.” As the Iranian foreign minister himself said.
On Thursday, the U.S.‑based Soufan Center explained the analysis of Matthew McInnis, former U.S. special representative for Iran, regarding Tehran’s defensive framework — a layered strategy built on three pillars: asymmetric warfare, missile power, and the contribution of regional allies. All of this stems from this mosaic‑style, fragmented defensive structure.
The use of drones against Gulf neighbors and the naval tactics of the Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz — fast boats, missile launches, and the threat of mining the waters — are clear evidence of the first pillar. Iranian launchers have also fired nearly 2,000 projectiles, both ballistic and cruise missiles, despite the losses suffered during the 12‑day conflict last June.
The third element of this structure — the participation of armed groups loyal to Tehran — may not have been massive, at least in the case of the Iraqi militias or Yemen’s Houthi rebels, but it has nonetheless had a significant psychological impact as a challenge and threat to the United States and Israel, fitting perfectly into the war‑of‑attrition strategy devised by Tehran.
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