From decentralised command cells to the Basij’s penetration of civil society, King’s College professor Andreas Krieg breaks down why Iran was built for exactly this war
By TRH World Desk
New Delhi, March 19, 2026 — The United States is in a Middle Eastern war it does not own, control, or understand. That is not an opposition talking point — it is the analytical conclusion of some of the most closely watched security scholars tracking the conflict.
Dr Andreas Krieg, professor at King’s College London, wrote in Dawn this week that the pattern is now unmistakable. Every war the West has fought in the post-9/11 era has ended in stalemate or outright defeat. Tactical successes have never consolidated into sustainable strategic outcomes — not for America, not for the region. The US-led coalition toppled Saddam Hussein in weeks in 2003. It then lost the subsequent war, fighting across a spectrum of insurgent groups and terrorist organisations for nearly two decades. “These non-state actors are geared towards endurance,” Krieg wrote, “winning through perseverance outside the binary western concepts of victory and defeat.”
Fast forward to 2026, and the architecture is identical. “America is again in the thick of a Middle Eastern war it does not own, control or understand,” Krieg wrote. “United States President Donald Trump was sucked into this strategic disaster by a subversive Israeli Prime Minister benefitting from permacrisis and managed chaos.”
The target this time is categorically different from anything the West has previously faced. Israel and America are not at war with a militia. They are at war, as Krieg frames it, with a militia that has a state — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has spent nearly five decades preparing for precisely this confrontation with a technologically superior enemy.
The IRGC is not a parallel military in the mould of the Republican Guards of Ba’athist Iraq or Syria. It is a parallel state. Its structure combines a central hub — the Office of the Supreme Leader — that sets strategic intent, with a resilient all-channel architecture that allows regional nodes and provincial cells to operate with decentralised agency. More than 60 local commands plan and execute operations with minimal integration into a central command-and-control pillar. In addition to approximately 200,000 uniformed personnel organised in a flat hierarchy, the IRGC has penetrated Iranian civil society through the Basij — a paramilitary network of roughly one million men and women serving as its internal security force and subversive link into a widely aggrieved population.
Anticipating this war, the IRGC activated what Krieg calls its Mosaic Defence doctrine: a form of mission command in which vague strategic intent is executed through dispersed cells at the tactical level. Where most military organisations display a U-shaped hierarchical command structure, the IRGC resembles a horizontal M-shaped structure in which local cells innovate and take initiative independently. The system is, by design, immune to decapitation.
With Iran now on a total war footing, the IRGC has effectively sidelined the clergy. The new hardline Supreme Leader is operationally incapacitated. The organisation that was always the real power in Tehran has removed any institutional check on its conduct.
The Gulf states are watching this dynamic and recalculating. Dr Krieg noted that the mood in the Gulf “has tangibly changed in the last few days vis-a-vis Iran, with more voices now calling to restore some balance of deterrence in response to Iranian aggression.” But he was precise about the limits of what Gulf military involvement could actually achieve. “Beyond signalling — at the cost of Iran being even less restrained in their retaliation and becoming junior partners to Israel’s campaign — there is little Gulf militaries can add to an attritious US/Israeli bombing campaign that will not bring a swift victory against this network of networks.”
Iran’s own strategists appear to have gamed this out in advance. Hamidreza Azizi identified the logic at the core of Tehran’s war strategy: “GCC involvement would not significantly change the situation on the ground, and would instead provide further justification to expand targeting of those countries.” Iran has structured its deterrence so that escalation by Gulf states serves Iranian strategic purposes — widening the conflict, deepening regional instability, and accelerating American exhaustion.
The question this war has now put before Washington is one it has been unable to answer since 2001: how do you defeat an enemy engineered specifically to survive you?
Follow The Raisina Hills on WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn
