Iran's way of warfare is being tested to its limits

Iran's way of warfare is being tested to its limits Omar Ashour on Thu, 03/26/2026 - 19:14 Hybrid defence strategy has helped Tehran withstand weeks of bombardment, but it has also revealed the country's primary weaknesses This video grab taken from the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB on 26 March 2026 shows what it says is part of a wave of missiles launched against Israel and US bases in the Gulf (IRIB TV/AFP) Off “We will not initiate war, but we possess overwhelming power to confront any aggression,” Iranian military commander Hossein Salami declared a year ago, just months before he was killed in an Israeli air strike. Iran’s way of warfare is best understood as a layered system of forward defence, rather than as conventional territorial defence. Tehran has sought to keep the decisive fights away from its core through a combination of allied non-state partners abroad, long-range missiles and one-way attack drones, dual military institutions at home, and the shadow - rather than the possession - of a possible nuclear deterrent. The current US-Israeli campaign has illuminated both the sophistication and the fragility of that force design. Iran has proven harder to paralyse than many assumed, yet much less able than its rhetoric implied to deny a first-rate air campaign over its own territory. Iran’s way of warfare is now being tested to its limits. The model began to be forged during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. Under sustained pressure, the Islamic Republic institutionalised revolutionary light infantry, infiltration, dispersal, martyrdom culture, and later naval swarming. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Iran’s order of battle still reflects that trauma. The regular Iranian army, known as the Artesh, provides the conventional ground, naval, air and air-defence arms. Parallel to it stands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), while the Basij paramilitary organisation functions as a mass mobilisation and internal-security reserve. The Artesh is the state’s conventional shield; the IRGC is the regime’s praetorian sword, missile arm, expeditionary organiser and political insurance policy. The Basij, however, should not be romanticised into a hidden combined-arms force. It is primarily an auxiliary light force for mobilisation, neighbourhood control, ideological enforcement and wartime reinforcement. It has reach, numbers and coercive utility, but no autonomous air or artillery units of its own. Chokepoint warfare After 1988, both the IRGC and the Artesh scarcely fought abroad, beyond their deployments to Syria and Iraq in the 2010s. Syria and Iraq taught Iran about urban warfare, siege and militia integration; they did not prepare it for repeated waves of F-35s, stand-off weapons, electronic suppression, and deep-penetration strikes delivered by B-2s. But Iran’s real innovation lay elsewhere. First came alliance-building with non-state partners. “Proxy” is often too inaccurate a term: Hezbollah, Iraqi armed factions and the Houthis have significant agency of their own, even while operating inside a broader Iranian strategic ecosystem. That network gave Tehran depth and shortened lines of pressure against Israel, the US and Gulf rivals. Unless the Trump administration can define what comes after degradation, it risks repeating an old pattern from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq: operational success with strategic defeat Second came the IRGC’s aerospace arm, which built the region’s largest missile force and a serious drone arsenal. Tehran paired range with improving accuracy. The Shahed family was especially important: not because it could win air superiority, but because it could overwhelm defences through saturation, shock and attrition. Third came the maritime layer. The regular navy provides broader presence, while the IRGC’s navy turns the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz into a battlespace of mines, anti-ship missiles, fast craft, unmanned systems and small submarines. With these assets, Iran wages chokepoint warfare rather than classical sea-control warfare: because it lacks a blue-water navy capable of matching the US or its Gulf partners ship for ship, it relies instead on swarming harassment tactics designed to raise insurance costs, paralyse commercial traffic, and turn access itself into a strategic vulnerability. This is no longer an operational concept, as has been clearly demonstrated by recent tanker attacks involving drones, and growing concerns over Iranian mine-laying and sea-drone operations near Hormuz. Unlike Ukraine’s brilliant “naval” campaign without a navy in the Black Sea, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz favours ambushes, deniability and coercive disruption. The size of the Black Sea enabled a broader campaign of fleet attrition, infrastructure strikes and operational displacement; Iran still cannot afford to fight in quite that way with its naval drones, given the capabilities of its adversaries. Strategically, this remains a clever economy-of-force design, protecting Iran by projecting danger outwards. Yet its central weakness has now been exposed. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Tehran prepared well for covert contestation, partner-enabled pressure, missile retaliation and deniable escalation. It prepared much less successfully for a close war in its own skies against a capable enemy air force backed by intelligence, penetration assets and deep-strike munitions. Institutional resilience The IRGC anticipated decapitation, and delegated authority far down the chain. That helped continuity, but continuity is not the same as air denial - nor were Iran’s “missile cities” an adequate answer. Hardening assets against enemy attacks was too often treated as a substitute for survivability - but hardened storage without mobility, camouflage, deception, dispersal and signature management still leaves it open to targeting. Even where penetrating weapons such as the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator did not physically collapse every underground chamber, they could still disrupt entrances, power, reload tempo and launcher mobility. Could Gulf states learn from Ukraine's drone revolution? Read More » And yet Iran has not collapsed. That is analytically important. The Taliban lost Kabul in little more than a month and Kandahar within two months in 2001; Saddam Hussein lost Baghdad in roughly three weeks in 2003. By contrast, Tehran continued retaliatory strikes within minutes-to-hours of losing senior leaders, while US intelligence assessments have said the regime is not at immediate risk of collapse. That’s a bold statement. The reason lies in institutional resilience: decentralised command, the Basij’s internal security reach, and a force design - forged under fire - that can disperse and reconstitute under air superiority and heavy bombardment. Even cyber, so often advertised as decisive, has looked more like an enabling and harassing instrument than a war-winning arm, much as in the case of Ukraine. The conclusion is therefore double-edged. Iran has built a genuinely hybrid, multi-domain form of combined-arms defence: allied non-state partners abroad, missiles and drones for distant punishment, dense internal-security institutions at home, and a maritime layer designed for coercion in the Gulf. That has made the American-Israeli strategy less clean and less decisive than its tactical and operational successes suggest. But the same war has also shown where Iran is weakest: in homeland air defence, counter-infiltration, and the protection of launch infrastructure under conditions of enemy air dominance. Attrition from the air is not, by itself, a strategy - and the elegant phrase “strategic bombardment” can often be misleading. Unless the Trump administration can define what comes after degradation - what is to be consolidated, by whom, and towards which alternative order - it risks repeating an old pattern from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq: operational success with strategic defeat. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. War on Iran Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0