The IRGC announced its 70th wave of Operation True Promise 4 on Saturday — four waves in four days since the 66th wave reported on Tuesday. Seventy waves in approximately 23 days of war yields an average of three per day. Each wave deploys combinations of Khorramshahr-4, Qadr multi-warhead, Kheibar Shekan, and Zolfaqar ballistic missiles alongside drones, targeting Israeli territory, US bases, and Gulf state infrastructure simultaneously. Iran has now fired more than 400 ballistic missiles at Israel since 28 February, with Israeli air defences intercepting approximately 92%.
The attack tempo has not faltered despite the loss of four senior IRGC-affiliated figures in a single week: Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani were killed together in Tehran on 16 March. Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib was killed the following day. IRGC spokesman Brig. Gen. Ali Mohammad Naeini was killed on 19 March — minutes after publicly insisting Iran was still manufacturing missiles, contradicting US claims of 90% capacity destruction. The IRGC simultaneously manages the strait of Hormuz toll system, processing roughly 89 to 90 vessels over the first two weeks of March under a regime that requires cargo manifests, crew nationalities, and payments of up to $2 million per transit1.
The IRGC's resilience reflects a command architecture built for exactly this scenario. The organisation was restructured after the January 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani, distributing operational authority across regional commands and functional directorates precisely to avoid single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities. The corps controls its own intelligence, its own missile forces, its own naval arm, and — through the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction headquarters — a parallel economic infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars. It does not require a functioning Supreme Leader to operate daily; Jerusalem Post sources described the current power arrangement as one in which "the Revolutionary Guards are controlling him, not the other way around"2, referring to Mojtaba Khamenei.
The US-Israeli campaign has now struck more than 8,000 targets and killed three members of The Supreme Leader's inner circle. The operational logic assumes that leadership elimination degrades an adversary's capacity to sustain operations and eventually forces a negotiated settlement. The IRGC's 70th wave is the counter-evidence: the organisation operates on institutional momentum, pre-delegated authority, and dispersed command nodes. The question this poses for Washington and Tel Aviv is whether the decapitation strategy has a threshold at which cumulative losses produce organisational paralysis — or whether the IRGC, like the Viet Cong's provincial structure or the Taliban's shura councils, is an institution whose distributed design means it absorbs leadership losses without proportional operational degradation.
