Iran’s Doctrine of Protracted War
Tehran has spent years preparing to fight this sort of conflict.
By: Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Rather than a short campaign defined by air superiority and decapitation strikes, the conflict reflects a deeper strategic contest.
The coalition seeks operational dominance through decapitation strikes, intelligence superiority and command disruption.
Iran, by contrast, is pursuing a strategy designed to prevent strategic annihilation by transforming the war into a protracted, regionally destabilizing conflict.
Tehran’s objective is not conventional battlefield victory but the creation of conditions in which the United States and Israel cannot achieve decisive results at an acceptable cost.
Understanding this approach requires examining the logic of Iranian military doctrine and strategic culture.
Over the past decade, Iran has developed a multilayered system intended to offset the technological advantages of its adversaries.
This system combines subterranean infrastructure, decentralized command structures, missile and drone warfare, and regional proxy networks.
Together, these elements are designed to preserve Iran’s retaliatory capacity under sustained attack while imposing economic, military and political costs on its enemies.
The result is a doctrine aimed less at winning wars quickly than at ensuring that any war becomes long, expensive and regionally disruptive.
Worst-Case Scenario
Iran was well aware of its vulnerability to U.S. and Israeli air superiority and advantages in space-based and signals intelligence.
In response, it developed plans that would enable the regime and key military assets to survive the first waves of enemy airstrikes and hit back against less-defended targets.
After last June’s 12-day war with Israel, Tehran reportedly began preparing a plan for the next attack.
Next time, it would attempt to sow chaos across the Middle East, attacking regional energy facilities, disrupting air and maritime communications and generating upheaval in global markets.
Iran’s leadership hoped that this escalation strategy would pressure the U.S. and Israel to halt their attacks, while degrading their economic and technological strengths.
Several principles define Iran’s broader strategy.
First, it seeks to create enough disruption – including by diverting U.S. and allied resources to defending bases, logistics and critical infrastructure in the region – to prevent a large-scale land invasion, even if it cannot control the skies.
Second, it aims to undermine regional connectivity, degrade the economic resilience of regional opponents and create a global economic crisis through the deterioration of financial, energy and economic conditions in a critical chokepoint: the Strait of Hormuz.
Knowing that it is severely outmatched by the U.S. Navy, Iran seeks to prevent the U.S. and allies from restoring shipping through the strait by combining naval mines as well as missile and drone warfare with coastal guerrilla principles.
Meanwhile, Tehran leverages regional proxies to force Israel to fight on multiple fronts.
The strategy also depends on political conditions beyond the battlefield.
Diplomacy and information warfare aim to gain the support of Muslim and Global South countries, or at least to secure their neutrality.
(For example, Iran claims that its attacks on its neighbors are directed only at Western military infrastructure used to attack it.)
It is especially important that Tehran keep Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Pakistan out of the war, so that it may concentrate on the southern and southwestern directions.
On Thursday, it was reported that Tehran agreed to allow Indian-flagged tankers to transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
Another objective is to convince Russia and China that Iran can sustain a prolonged war, thereby encouraging future military, economic and intelligence support.
Domestically, the regime seeks to maintain enough cohesion between society and the state to avoid internal collapse under external pressure.
Finally, it hopes to force a split within the West over the war, keeping the burden primarily on U.S. and Israeli resources.
Mosaic Defense Plan
Iran’s response to the attack was sluggish, beginning one to two hours after the initial U.S.-Israeli decapitation strikes.
This is despite the fact that, unlike during last year’s conflict, Israel and the U.S. did not target Iran’s missile bunkers and launch sites in the first wave.
By midday, however, Tehran implemented its “mosaic” defense plan, which grants maximum autonomy to local commanders and local governments.
Throughout the late 2010s, Iran repeatedly practiced its decentralized defensive plan.
It was put into live action once before, following the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike in early 2020.
After attacking U.S. military bases in the region, Iran was braced for America’s retaliation when the Iranian commander of a Tor-M1 air defense missile system mistook a Boeing 737 passenger aircraft operated by Ukraine International Airlines for an enemy cruise missile and decided independently to shoot it down, killing all 176 passengers.
After that incident, Iran set aside the mosaic defense concept, even through the 12-day war.
However, it was publicly reimplemented on March 1, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asserting that the U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian capital “have no impact on our ability to conduct war” because military units were operating independently in accordance with pre-issued general instructions.
Similarly, a Ministry of Defense spokesperson said at least three designated successors had been appointed for each commander, and killing one would not create a vacuum.
The strengths of such a system are clear, but its weaknesses are equally significant.
Decentralization reduces vulnerability to leadership losses, yet it also increases the risk of poor coordination and unintended escalation.
Autonomous actions by local commanders can produce chaos rather than coherent operations, especially in a conflict involving multiple fronts and regional actors.
For this reason, mosaic defense functions primarily as an emergency mechanism for the early phase of war rather than a complete operational framework.
Lessons From Ukraine
Another element of Iran’s doctrine can be described as “Ukrainization,” drawing on lessons from the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For Iranian war planners, Ukraine’s example shows that a weaker state can survive against a stronger adversary by creating conditions for active-defense tactics along the front and sustaining an asymmetric deterrence posture.
In Iran’s case, the “frontline” is likely to be more fluid than in Ukraine, but the underlying objective is similar: to undermine the infrastructure and war-making capacity of the involved powers through systematic drone and missile strikes.
Applying the drone strategy and tactics from the Russia-Ukraine war in the Middle East could enable Iran to harass its neighbors in all directions, sowing regionwide chaos and threatening the security architecture that has existed in the region since the start of the 20th century.
Economic and technological infrastructure in the Gulf states is particularly at risk.
Sensing an opportunity to build goodwill and leverage, Ukraine has already proposed sending specialists and experienced anti-drone crews to Gulf states.
Those states have also expressed interest in buying Ukrainian drones.
However, Iran has only so many missiles in storage, and there are indications that some of the drones it is deploying incorporate Russian components.
If it intends to rely on drones over the long term, it would require reliable supply routes, something Iran lacks compared with Ukraine’s access to resupply via Romania and Poland.
Tehran’s main options are the Pakistani border and the Caspian Sea, which could theoretically connect Iran to Russia and China.
However, it is unlikely that Turkey, the South Caucasus or Central Asian states would allow their territory to be used to materially support the Iranian regime.
This limitation makes Iran’s domestic production, underground facilities and mobile launch systems even more important.
Over the past decade, Iran has developed an extensive system of underground facilities to conceal and protect key military assets (namely, drones and missiles).
The objective was to mitigate the U.S. and Israeli advantage in airpower and space-based and signals intelligence, while maintaining effective counterstrikes against adversary logistics in the region and beyond.
(Some missiles in Iran’s arsenal have a range of 2,000 kilometers or 1,240 miles.)
Through its proxies, Iran has demonstrated the effectiveness of subterranean warfare in sustaining prolonged asymmetric conflict.
It would be a strategic miscalculation to assume that the regime has not prepared for a comparable strategy inside Iran, but on a much greater scale than the Houthis, Hamas or Hezbollah.
Conclusion
None of this guarantees success.
Iran’s strategy depends on assumptions that may not hold, especially that regional states will stay neutral and that domestic cohesion will endure.
A decentralized command structure could produce miscalculation, or the U.S.-Israeli coalition could degrade Iran’s capacity to produce new drones and missiles or receive critical supplies from abroad.
Yet the overall logic is consistent.
Tehran is reasonably prepared for an air war without land operations, where attrition reigns and victory is difficult to define.
Iran’s strategy, in this sense, is defensive in purpose but expansive in method.
Unable to match the United States and Israel in conventional power, Iran seeks to prevent decisive defeat by turning the war into a long and costly struggle.
If Iran succeeds in widening the conflict while avoiding collapse, the result could be a strategic environment in which the Middle East and Eastern Europe become linked parts of a broader Eurasian theater of instability.
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