18APR

IRGC splits into 31 autonomous units

3 min read

14:57UTC

Iran's response to the killing of its senior commanders distributes strike authority to every province — solving one problem while creating another that makes any ceasefire structurally harder to hold.

← Back to Hormuz opens and closes in 24 hours Jump to analysis ↓

ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

By distributing strike authority across 31 provincial commands embedded in existing administrative infrastructure, Iran has made ceasefire verification structurally impossible under any framework requiring a single authoritative 'stop' order — and has done so through a design that has been in preparation since 2020.

Israeli analysts and The Jerusalem Post reported that Iran has fully activated its 'Decentralised Mosaic Defence' doctrine, restructuring the IRGC into 31 autonomous operational units — one per province — with regional commanders authorised to conduct strikes without central authorisation. Iran has not confirmed the change.

The restructuring is a direct doctrinal counter to the killing of IRGC Ground Forces Commander Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour and other senior officers on 28 February. The logic: if the enemy can paralyse your organisation by killing its commanders, remove the requirement for Central Command. The mosaic defence concept has been part of IRGC doctrine since at least the mid-2000s, developed after studying how US precision strikes dismantled Iraqi command structures in 2003. Its full activation now — under fire — tests whether peacetime doctrine survives contact with wartime reality.

CENTCOM has been directed to 'dismantle the Iranian regime's security apparatus' — a war aim the mosaic restructuring is explicitly designed to frustrate, since there is no single node whose destruction collapses the system. From the opposite direction, a Ceasefire requires a single authority that can order all forces to stop. Thirty-one autonomous commands, each authorised to strike independently, create 31 potential points of failure in any cessation of hostilities. The same structural change that makes Iran harder to defeat also makes it harder to negotiate with.

The reporting carries a sourcing caveat: it originates from Israeli analysts, not Iranian officials, and Israel has an operational interest in portraying Iranian forces as both degraded and dispersed. Whether all 31 provincial commands have functioning launch capability, adequate munitions, and intact communications is unknown. The decline from early-conflict salvos of hundreds of missiles to Wave 17's 'more than 40' could reflect attrition, conservation, or the friction of a command structure reorganising under fire.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Until now, Iran's military operated like most militaries: a hierarchy where orders flow from the top down, and a ceasefire agreement with top leadership would stop the fighting. Iran has now restructured so that 31 separate regional commanders each have independent authority to launch attacks — no single person or office can order all of them to stop simultaneously. Even if Iran's President or the new Supreme Leader genuinely agreed to a ceasefire, any one of 31 commanders could continue strikes, whether out of disagreement, miscommunication, or deliberate sabotage by hardliners. This is not an accident — it is a deliberate strategy to make Iran harder to defeat through targeted killings of senior commanders, at the cost of also making Iran harder to negotiate with.

Deep Analysis

Synthesis

The activation creates a structural asymmetry in the conflict's endgame that extends beyond the ceasefire problem the body identifies: any future arms control or verification regime — analogous to JCPOA-style inspections — will need to encompass 31 distributed military nodes rather than a single ministry. The cost and complexity of that verification architecture may be prohibitive, making post-conflict settlement structurally harder than any previous Iran negotiation, regardless of political will on either side.

Root Causes

The doctrine is a deliberate inversion of the Western targeting theory of victory: Western and Israeli doctrine assumes degrading command and control will translate into political compliance by a leadership unable to sustain operations. Mosaic Defence severs that causal link — by eliminating the single authoritative command node, Iran removes the mechanism through which military degradation is supposed to produce political capitulation.

Escalation

Thirty-one autonomous commands each incentivised to demonstrate operational relevance create structural escalatory pressure independent of Tehran's political decisions. The doctrine removes the 'off switch' that ceasefire negotiation requires, ensuring that strikes will continue even if political leadership signals willingness to halt — the body identifies this problem but understates its permanence: reverting to centralised command would require Iran to publicly abandon the doctrine under fire, which is politically and militarily implausible.

What could happen next?

1 consequence2 risk1 meaning1 precedent

Consequence
Any ceasefire negotiation must now account for 31 autonomous commands rather than a single authority, raising the minimum diplomatic complexity of any halt to hostilities by an order of magnitude.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
Provincial commanders acting without central authorisation may strike targets — civilian infrastructure, diplomatic facilities, foreign military assets — that Tehran's political leadership would not sanction, creating escalation events outside any negotiating framework.
Short term · Assessed
Meaning
Iran has accepted significant internal coordination costs and command incoherence as the price of survivability, signalling that regime preservation now outranks military efficiency as the primary strategic objective.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
Post-conflict arms control and verification architecture — any JCPOA successor — will need to encompass 31 distributed military nodes, a structural complexity that may render negotiated settlement prohibitively difficult regardless of political will.
Long term · Assessed
Precedent
Successful operational activation of Mosaic Defence under combat conditions establishes a template other distributed-network actors (Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraq's PMF) will observe and adapt to their own command structures.
Long term · Suggested

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from Israel

Israel×2

LeftRight

The Mosaic Defence Doctrine's operational planning accelerated after the January 2020 Soleimani killing, which demonstrated the catastrophic vulnerability of personalised Central Command — meaning the current activation is a rehearsed response to a contingency Iran has been war-gaming for over five years, not an improvised adaptation.

Iran's 31-province structure maps precisely onto existing administrative divisions, meaning the military reorganisation leverages pre-built civil-military logistics, recruitment, and communications infrastructure rather than creating new ones.

Why it’s relevant now

A rehearsed, infrastructure-embedded doctrine is significantly more robust than an improvised one — the Soleimani planning origin implies Iran's provincial commands already have established procedures, supply chains, and communications protocols, making degradation through further strikes substantially harder than targeting a new organisational overlay would be.

RAND Corporation's Mosaic Warfare research (developed as a US offensive concept by Michael Mazarr and colleagues) is now being applied defensively by Iran — an irony RAND analysts have flagged in the context of technology and doctrine diffusion.

The Belfer Center's Iran Project has noted that the JCPOA negotiations required years to establish a single Iranian interlocutor with authority to commit both civilian and military institutions; no Ceasefire architecture has ever been successfully negotiated with a 31-node distributed command structure, and existing arms control frameworks contain no verification templates applicable to it.

Sources:Times of Israel·Jerusalem Post

Mentions:CENTCOM (US Central Command) →IRGC Commander Pakpour →JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) →National Security Council (Iran) →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Israel →Decentralised Mosaic Defence →Jerusalem Post →Iran →

First Reported In

Update #22 · IRGC drones hit Azerbaijan; CIA link cut

Times of Israel· 5 Mar 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

This Event

IRGC splits into 31 autonomous units

The restructuring is a direct doctrinal counter to command decapitation, but 31 independent strike authorities create 31 potential points of failure in any future ceasefire — the same change that makes Iran harder to defeat also makes it harder to negotiate with.

Led to

US destroys Iran's satellite targeting

Iran's activation of Mosaic Defence doctrine devolving launch to 31 provincial units makes space-based targeting data more critical; destroying space command degrades the remaining dispersed capability

Occurred 6 Mar 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Shipping and war-risk insurers

War-risk premiums for Hormuz transits reached 3 to 10 per cent of hull value on 17 July, against 0.25 per cent before the war, as Brent cleared $87 and daily transits fell to eight vessels. Underwriters are pricing the confirmed UKMTO mine near the Traffic Separation Scheme, not the IRGC's unconfirmed 18 July mining claim, which CENTCOM called false.

Oman

Abbas Araghchi led an Iranian delegation to Oman-hosted talks in Muscat on 18 July, an agenda confined to reopening the Strait of Hormuz and nothing else. Oman's decades of studied neutrality make it the one channel neither Washington nor Tehran needs to be seen initiating, and that narrowness is what lets it survive the bombing.

Kuwait

Kuwait's electricity ministry asked residents to ration water and power after the IRGC set Shuaiba's generating units alight on 17 July, the second Kuwaiti site struck in two days. The country draws 90 per cent of its drinking water from plants sharing power infrastructure, so one strike reaches every tap in the hottest weeks of the year.

Jordan

Amman still reports no casualties or damage of its own from the 17 July attack even as CENTCOM confirmed two American dead on the same runway, a line it has not amended since. Hosting the base that produced the war's first US fatalities puts Jordan's decades-old defence arrangement with Washington under a domestic scrutiny it has not faced before.

Tehran / Artesh and AEOI

Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation called the alleged Darkhovin strike a violation of international law, while the Artesh put Operation Saeqeh, its campaign against Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain, at phases 14 and 15 by 18 July. Domestic outlets Fars and Tabnak claim 16 Americans dead since February, a toll no source outside Iran supports.

CENTCOM / Washington

CENTCOM confirmed two dead and one missing at Muwaffaq Salti on 17 July, when Jordan says its air defences intercepted eight of ten incoming missiles, against five of five stopped on 10 June. Its own strikes stay aimed at Iran's coast, interior and navy, not the Artesh campaign that killed them.