What emerges from the record is not a state in collapse, nor one rebuilding a carbon copy of what was destroyed. Iran is doing something more strategically interesting: conducting a doctrinal audit in real time, explicitly debating whether Mosaic Defence needs to be deepened, revised, or replaced. The answers being given by different factions inside the regime are not the same — which itself tells us something important about the political dynamics shaping reconstitution.
The doctrinal
debate: deepen, revise, or abandon?
The most important
analytical development is that Iran's post-war internal discourse has made the
doctrinal debate explicit rather than tacit. This is unusual — states rarely
publish their strategic self-criticism so transparently — and it gives us unusually
direct insight into the reconstitution logic.
The clearest
doctrinal signal came from IRGC analyst Khani in October 2025. Khani proposed
expanding former IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari's 2005 Mosaic
Doctrine, which decentralized the IRGC by establishing 32 IRGC provincial units
across Iran. Khani argued that Iran should decentralize supply chains, defense
systems, and command and control authority to lower levels to make wartime
decision-making more efficient and effective. Critical Threats The prescription is revealing: the lesson
drawn is not that decentralization failed, but that it was insufficiently
deep. The problem identified was a C2 bottleneck at the top — Khamenei
himself.
IRGC Coordination
Deputy Brigadier General Naghdi acknowledged that Iran failed to respond
quickly during the Israel-Iran war. Naghdi stated that IRGC units requested
authorization to strike Israel early on June 13, but the supreme leader delayed
the order until the regime could appoint new commanders to replace those who
Israel had just killed. Critical Threats
This is a remarkable
admission. The decapitation succeeded not because Iran couldn't fire — the
missiles kept launching — but because in the critical first hours, the
authorization architecture required the supreme leader's personal approval
before major strike packages could be released. The doctrine's pre-scripted
autonomy protocols did not cover the transition between command layers fast
enough. The proposed fix — pushing authorization authority lower,
pre-delegating strike decisions to provincial and unit commanders — directly
addresses this gap. It is, essentially, Mosaic Defence 2.0: not just dispersed
forces, but dispersed authority.
The counter-argument
within Iran is equally important. A few days after the war, former Foreign
Minister Zarif published an essay urging a major "paradigm shift"
toward domestic reform and negotiation, calling on the regime to halt uranium
enrichment voluntarily and allow IAEA inspections in exchange for sanctions
relief. Khamenei's office and the IRGC media have immediately denounced these
proposals as treasonous. Middle East Forum The reformist faction sees the war's
outcome as proof that the resistance doctrine itself is the liability — that
Mosaic Defence creates the threat profile that makes Iran a target. The
hardliner faction sees the same outcome as proof of insufficient implementation.
Both readings from the same data set, producing opposite prescriptions. As of
early 2026, the hardliners hold the institutional levers, but the elimination
of so many hardline elites following the war has empowered reformists to voice
their concerns in ways previously suppressed. Middle East Forum
Hardware
reconstitution: a deliberately sequenced priority stack
Iran is not
rebuilding everything equally. The Islamic Republic appears to have adopted a
differential reconstruction doctrine, combining a semblance of willingness for
diplomacy with the West while prioritizing the rehabilitation of air defense
capabilities, the restoration of the ballistic missile program, and the
acceleration of the fortification of nuclear facilities deep underground. Alma Research and Education Center
The sequencing is
strategically coherent. Air defense comes first because without it, Iran cannot
protect the other reconstitution efforts from future strikes. But this is where
a hard material constraint bites: the Israeli strategy over the past two years
destroyed Iran's Russian-supplied defensive S-300 missile systems, paving the
way for potential future Israeli strikes. Alma Research and Education Center Russia cannot or will
not replace these systems in the current political environment, and no
equivalent is available through Iran's other supply channels. The air defense
gap is not being closed — it is being managed.
The ballistic
missile program reconstitution is running into a specific chokepoint:
solid-fuel missile production requires planetary mixers that Iran cannot
manufacture indigenously and must import. In December 2025, American special
forces raided a merchant ship in the Indian Ocean making its way from China to
Iran and confiscated military cargo intended for the IRGC in an effort to
prevent the replacement of the destroyed mixers. Alma Research and Education Center This is a precise,
surgical application of economic attrition pressure — not broad sanctions, but
targeted interdiction of the one component that unlocks Iran's most capable
deterrent.
The nuclear program
reconstitution is the most strategically consequential thread. The IAEA's
director general stated that Iran retains the industrial capacity and knowledge
required to resume enrichment work, Small Wars Journal and one of the
Iranian lessons from the war appears to be the transfer of the remainder of the
program to underground facilities more immune from intelligence satellites and
IAEA inspectors. Alma Research and Education Center At Parchin specifically,
construction of underground concrete infrastructure was identified in November
2025, designed to contain a blast chamber whose purpose is conducting
high-explosive experiments essential for developing mechanisms required to activate
a nuclear device. Critical Threats Iran is not abandoning the nuclear program
— it is making the next strike against it harder, by removing it from
observable surface locations into depths that current Israeli and US munitions
cannot reliably reach.
Proxy
reconfiguration: from hub-and-spoke to resistance network
This is where the
most interesting structural evolution is occurring — and where Mosaic Defence's
proxy coherence vulnerability is being directly addressed, though in a way that
creates new problems.
The Axis of
Resistance has evolved into a decentralized network sustained by a gray-zone
economy of oil smuggling, cryptocurrency, and reconstruction contracts, coupled
with an ideology of endurance. Structurally, the axis now operates as a loose
confederation of semi-autonomous militias bound by a shared deterrence
doctrine, making it more durable but less controllable for Tehran. Middle East Institute
The final clause is
the critical tension: Iran is deliberately reducing centralized control over
its proxies to make them more resilient to decapitation — but this trades the
coherence problem for a controllability problem. A proxy network that can survive
independently of Iranian command also pursues its own interests independently.
What began as a tight hub-and-spoke model centered around the IRGC now behaves
as a flatter resistance network bound by shared doctrine more than centralized
command. Middle East Institute
The Houthis have
emerged as the most operationally active node in this reconfigured network
precisely because they were the least damaged during the Israel-Iran
confrontation and retain geographic insulation. The Houthis have become the
most important proxy arm, deployed to harass the global economy and trade
routes in the Red Sea. Alma Research and Education Center This is not incidental —
it is Iran using its most intact proxy to impose costs on Israel and the US
through a domain (maritime commercial disruption) where direct retaliation is
politically and legally complicated.
The gray-zone
financing architecture underpinning all of this is more resilient than the
military hardware. Iranian companies linked to the IRGC continue to finance
Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi PMF, and the Yemeni Houthis through semi-licit
markets, ensuring operational resilience, Middle East Institute with more than $10 billion of
laundered Iranian oil proceeds routed annually through front companies to the
IRGC Quds Force and proxies. Middle East Institute Destroying missiles and killing
commanders is difficult to sustain as a strategy when the financial plumbing
that regenerates those capabilities remains functional.
The institutional
dimension: IRGC credibility and political restructuring
This thread is
underappreciated in most military analysis but may be the most consequential
long-term factor. The 12-Day War exposed the Islamic Republic and the IRGC's
structural weaknesses and demonstrated Israel's technological superiority,
accelerating the regime's loss of strategic coherence, prompting increased
repression, a nationalist pivot, and institutional restructuring. Middle East Forum
The SNSC — Iran's
top national security body — was restructured after the war. The appointment of
Larijani as SNSC head is a sign of the supreme leader's dissatisfaction with
the previous hardliner IRGC general. Most of the people who were assassinated belonged
to the hardline camp, including the head of the intelligence organization and
his deputies. Middle East Forum What Rising Lion accomplished, beyond
physical destruction, was a selective decapitation of the hardline IRGC faction
— creating political space for institutional restructuring that Israel could
never have engineered through direct pressure alone.
The nationalist
pivot is doctrinally significant. The Islamic Republic has always grounded its
military posture in ideological terms — resistance as theological obligation,
the destruction of Israel as political-religious imperative. The post-war
recalibration toward survival and territorial integrity rhetoric is a quiet but
meaningful shift. A doctrine justified by territorial defense is more likely to
attract genuine popular support than one justified by ideology — which
partially addresses the domestic legitimacy vulnerability that eroded Mosaic
Defence's popular mobilization premise.
The net
assessment: what reconstitution tells us about doctrine
Compared to June
2025, Iran today appears more structurally aggressive in doctrine — formally
embracing earlier and more extensive use of regional missiles, drones,
cyberattacks and energy coercion — but is operationally constrained by battle
damage, sanctions and internal instability. Iran has become more risk-accepting
and escalatory in nature, but its degraded capabilities and fear of triggering
an outright regime-ending campaign push it toward calibrated, episodic bursts
of aggression rather than permanent high-intensity warfare. Al Jazeera
This is the
essential paradox of the reconstitution: doctrine is becoming more aggressive
while capability to execute that doctrine is temporarily degraded. The gap
between stated posture and actual capacity creates instability — states in this
condition tend toward miscalculation because their signaling doesn't accurately
reflect their operational limits.
The deeper Mosaic
Defence logic remains intact and is being reinforced rather than abandoned.
Iran's lesson from June 2025 is not "decentralization failed" — it is
"our decentralization wasn't deep enough, our supply chains were too
visible, and our nuclear program needs to go further underground." Every
adaptation is an intensification of the original doctrine's core principles,
not a departure from them.
The unanswerable
question — and the one that makes this the most interesting strategic case
study of the current era — is whether Mosaic Defence 2.0 will eventually
produce a reconstituted capability that Israel cannot prevent, or whether the
interdiction campaign against planetary mixers, supply chains, and financial
networks can sustain enough attrition to keep Iran below the threshold of
strategic relevance. If Iran's ballistic missile production reconstitutes
faster than diplomacy can constrain it, Israel faces a rapidly closing window
in which strikes remain feasible. Small Wars Journal
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