16MAY

IRGC splits into 31 autonomous units

3 min read

12:41UTC

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 Two Hormuz papers; Washington on neither 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:attrition →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

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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

India (BRICS meeting host, grey-market beneficiary)

New Delhi hosted the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting on 14 May that Araghchi attended under the Minab168 designation, giving India a front-row seat to Iran's diplomatic positioning. India's state refiners have been absorbing discounted Iranian crude through grey-market routing since April; Brent at $109.30 means every barrel sourced outside the formal market generates a structural saving.

Hengaw / Kurdish human rights monitors

Hengaw's daily reports from Iran's Kurdish provinces remain the sole independent cross-check on Iran's judicial activity during the conflict. Two executions across Qom and Karaj Central prisons on 15 May and five Kurdish detentions on 15-16 May indicate the wartime judicial pipeline is operating independently of military tempo.

Pakistan (mediator and bilateral partner)

Islamabad spent its diplomatic capital as the US-Iran MOU carrier to secure LNG passage for two Qatari vessels through a bilateral Pakistan-Iran agreement, spending its mediation credit for direct economic gain. China's public endorsement of Pakistan's mediatory role on 13 May is the structural reward.

China and BRICS bloc

Beijing endorsed Pakistan's mediatory role on 13 May, one day after the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi. Chinese state banks are processing PGSA yuan toll payments; China has not commented on its vessels' continued Hormuz passage, but benefits structurally from a non-dollar toll system it did not design.

Iraq (bilateral passage partner)

Baghdad negotiated a 2-million-barrel VLCC transit without paying PGSA yuan tolls, offering political alignment in lieu of cash. Iraq's position inside Iran's adjacent bloc makes it the natural first bilateral partner and a template for how Tehran structures passage deals with states that cannot afford Western coalition membership.

Bahrain and Qatar (Gulf signatories)

Both signed the Western coalition paper while hosting US Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM's Al Udeid base, respectively. Qatar occupies the sharpest contradiction: it is on coalition paper while simultaneously receiving LNG passage through the bilateral Iran-Pakistan track, a position Doha has tacitly accepted from both sides.