How is Iran STILL fighting back? Using a Mosaic Defence they learned from the fall of Saddam: DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

Thick smoke drifts across Iran’s horizon; The pungent smell of burning oil hangs over the cities. Tankers are burning and unmanned aerial vehicles are attacking in the Strait of Hormuz. Violence spreads like an infection.

Operation Epic Fury is now in its third week and its effects are global. According to U.S. Central Command, as of March 12, U.S. and Israeli forces had hit nearly 6,000 targets in Iran since the start of operations; Approximately 460 attacks were carried out per day.

Iran’s leadership was beheaded; The control centers are in disarray, the nuclear program is in ruins.

But still the Iranians continue to fight. How? Because they spent twenty years preparing for this moment.

Their strategy is known as Decentralized Mosaic Defense (DMD) and is built around a single brutal principle: even if the ‘head’ is cut off, the ‘body’ continues to fight; This is exactly what the Americans did on the first day of the war when they killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In DMD, authority is deliberately distributed across dozens of semi-independent nodes, each with its own intelligence, weapons, and command structure. Units operate on standing orders; They do not wait for instructions from above.

As Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi explained on 1 March: ‘Bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to wage war… Decentralized Mosaic Defense allows us to decide when and how the war ends.’

Former Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) commander-in-chief General Mohammed Jafari publicly announced his defense plan in 2005; More importantly, it arose from watching the mistakes of the West – especially the Americans – in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even going back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

These conflicts, along with the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, embedded a culture of resilience and resistance deep within the Iranian state.

As Araghchi confirms: ‘We have had twenty years to examine the defeats suffered by the US military in our near east and west. ‘We’ve included lessons accordingly.’

The lesson of Iraq 2003 was inevitable: Saddam Hussein had a highly centralized army. When the leadership left, the entire structure collapsed within a few weeks.

That’s not all they learned from the West’s intervention in Iraq. In 1981, Israeli jets destroyed Saddam Hussein’s only above-ground reactor at Osirak. Once again, Iran worked and learned.

They realized that in recent years the United States has increasingly relied on that one cruel idea: If you remove the head, the body collapses. It more or less worked for Saddam Hussein. (This was not the case with Osama bin Laden, whose death had little effect in destroying al-Qaeda; nor did the assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi end the group’s terror.)

But the Iranians knew that the Americans would eventually go directly at their Supreme Leader, and they had a plan to inoculate them when that happened.

They dispersed their nuclear infrastructure across the country and buried important areas underground. The principle was the same: Never give the enemy a single target whose destruction could end the war.

In both cases, Iran looked at what Iraq was doing and built the opposite.

And the plan came to fruition twenty years later, when Khamenei was killed.

The Revolutionary Guard is divided into provincial commands in Iran’s 31 provinces. Each unit operates as a self-contained mini army, with its own intelligence cells and ground forces. State commanders have full tactical authority: They can launch missile strikes, conduct drone strikes, and even harass ships without approval from above.

Iran has reportedly fired approximately 700 missiles and 3,600 drones from units scattered across the country since the start of the war.

Volume alone (cheap production) is part of the strategy. Iran has hit neighboring Gulf states, the UAE, shipping lines and even Dubai airport, among other things.

An Iranian military truck carrying missiles drives in front of the officials’ stand during a military parade in 2019

Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Brigadier General Muhammad Ali Jafari

These are all designed to expand the battlefield: to overwhelm and force the enemy to spend much more expensive weapons in response. And fighting indirectly (through proxy forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen) is at the heart of Iran’s strategic thinking: If you can’t fight your enemy directly, hit and exhaust him by other means.

And it works, at least to some extent.

Israel’s ballistic missile interceptors are running low, which is exactly the fatigue that Iran’s doctrine aims to create.

This is their second strategy: cost asymmetry. The production cost of the Iranian Shahed-136 drone is perhaps $20,000 to $50,000. Hitting it might require interceptors costing tens of thousands (such as Israel’s Iron Dome missiles, worth about $50,000 each) and Patriot missile system interceptors costing $3-4 million.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz is part of the same logic: The military cost to Iran of effectively closing the strait by attacking ships is relatively low, but the global cost is huge.

Oil is hovering around $100 per barrel. Oil prices in the United States have increased by 23 percent since the start of the war. The goal is not to win militarily in the traditional sense, but to make the war politically and economically expensive enough to eventually exhaust the United States and Israel.

It’s not a perfect system. Iranians are being beaten. While they are smart, so are the Israelis; and no one can compare to the truly formidable military might of the United States.

Moreover, decentralization cuts both ways: autonomous units mean unpredictable behavior. More actors making independent decisions means a higher risk of miscalculation or unintentional tension.

While elite units can hold together under the intense bombardment experienced by Iran, less experienced provincial units are more likely to descend into confusion and disorganization.

Soldiers from a unit of the Iranian army march during the annual military parade in 2024

Most of this is already happening. As I have written in these pages, there is internal chaos among sections of the security forces that Israel has completely penetrated.

The doctrine also assumes that Iran has enough missiles and drones to sustain a long war. However, due to the bombing of production facilities, doubts about the supply are increasing. If Israelis are decreasing, Iranians are also decreasing.

The question now is whether the United States and its allies have the disruptors, the stamina and, above all, the political will to keep going.

The mosaic is cracked. But it hasn’t been demolished yet.