Key Points:
- Destroying Iran’s leadership hierarchy does not destroy its cause. History, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, shows that decapitation strategies push adversaries underground, making them more diffuse and more resistant to conventional military pressure.
- A decentralized IRGC is not a weaker IRGC. With civilian oversight removed, hardline commanders now operate with full autonomy, and terrorism, as the established literature confirms, is the weapon of choice for actors who cannot match U.S. conventional power.
- U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria face heightened risk. A fragmented Iran, no longer constrained by diplomatic calculations in Tehran, is better positioned, not worse, to wage the kind of irregular, below-the-threshold campaign that proxy networks excel at.
The U.S. strikes that killed senior IRGC commanders and Iran’s Supreme Leader have been welcomed as a decisive blow. This piece argues the opposite: by decapitating Iran’s central command, Washington may have transformed a manageable state adversary into a decentralized, harder-to-deter network of ideologically driven paramilitary forces, ones with every incentive to turn to terrorism and irregular warfare rather than accept defeat.
There is a seductive logic to targeting an enemy’s leadership. Cut off the head, the thinking goes, and the body will stop moving. It is the logic that has guided American airpower from Baghdad to Kabul, and it is now, once again, being applied to Tehran. The strikes that have killed key figures in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and, according to reports, the Supreme Leader himself, have been celebrated in certain quarters as a decisive blow against the Islamic Republic. They are nothing of the sort. They may, in fact, be the opening chapter of a far longer and more painful story.[1]
The history of modern warfare is instructive here, as a hard-won lesson that Washington has repeatedly refused to absorb. When the United States launched Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam’s command infrastructure in the 1960s, it did not produce a centralized surrender. It produced the opposite: a dispersed, decentralized insurgency that adapted, dissolved into the countryside, and outlasted the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The lesson of Vietnam, echoed later in Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan, is that destroying a hierarchy does not destroy a cause. It merely pushes it underground, where it becomes harder to see, harder to target, and harder to defeat.[2]
Iran’s armed forces, and particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were never a purely top-down institution. For decades, the IRGC has cultivated regional proxies, embedded itself in Lebanon through Hezbollah, in Iraq through the Popular Mobilization Forces, in Yemen through the Houthis.[3] These were not extensions of a central command sitting around waiting for orders from Tehran. They were semi-autonomous nodes in a broader ideological network.[4] With that central command now decapitated, those nodes do not wither. They operate on their own initiative. The IRGC’s hardline factions, long kept in check by the civilian diplomatic apparatus in Tehran, are now freed from that constraint entirely. Power does not disappear when a supreme leader dies. It fragments. And fragmented power, distributed among ideologically committed military units with weapons caches and networks already in place, is basically the definition of an insurgency.
This brings us to a concept in the terrorism literature that deserves far more prominence in the current policy debate: terrorism is the weapon of the weak. As scholars from Martha Crenshaw to Bruce Hoffman have long argued, non-state and quasi-state actors who cannot match an adversary’s conventional military power do not simply accept defeat. They shift the arena. They abandon the battlefield where they are outmatched and move into the shadows: assassinations, bombings, sabotage, cyberattacks, and the kind of slow-burning irregular warfare that is largely immune to surgical strikes.[5] Iran, which has never been able to challenge the United States symmetrically, now has every incentive and every capability to wage precisely this kind of conflict.
The implications are concrete and immediate. With central civilian authority now gone, the IRGC’s most hardline commanders, men who have long chafed under what they considered diplomatic timidity, are filling the vacuum. They are not interested in negotiation. They are not beholden to an electorate or a foreign ministry. They are true believers with guns, and they now have something they have always lacked: operational autonomy. The likelihood of Iran-sponsored terrorism spiking is not a hypothetical. It is a near-certainty. American embassies, European allies, and Gulf states that supported the strikes should be preparing themselves for an irregular campaign that will be diffuse, deniable, and deeply difficult to attribute, let alone deter.[6]
There is a particular irony in how this moment intersects with American strategy in northeastern Syria. Washington has been quietly strengthening its partnership with Kurdish forces against Iran. But a decentralized Iran is not necessarily a weaker adversary for the Kurds. It may actually be a more dangerous one. Iranian paramilitary networks in Iraq and Syria do not require orders from Tehran to harass, infiltrate, or fund spoiler groups along the Kurdish frontier. A dispersed IRGC, operating without the restraint of a central government that occasionally weighed the diplomatic costs of its actions, is now ideally structured to wage precisely the kind of below-the-threshold campaign that Kurdish forces are least equipped to absorb.[7]
The deeper problem is the assumption, embedded in the current strategy, that regime change in Iran is both achievable and desirable through military pressure alone. The Islamic Republic is not a government sitting atop a passive population waiting to be liberated. It is a revolutionary project that has survived forty years of sanctions, a catastrophic war with Iraq, and repeated internal crises.[8] Its security apparatus is not simply a bureaucratic structure. It is an ideological movement. And movements do not surrender when their leaders are killed. They martyr them.
Conclusion
None of this is to suggest that Iran under its previous leadership was a stabilizing force, or that the United States had no legitimate grievances. The IRGC’s destabilizing activities across the Middle East were real. The threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program was real. But the question of whether those threats justified a strategy that is likely to produce a leaderless, radicalized, decentralized Iranian security apparatus is one that Washington does not appear to have fully reckoned with. Also, the attempts to force Iran into capitulation by stoking ethnic unrest would only deepen the country’s existing social fractures, thereby further inflaming the instability created by a leaderless, decentralized security and administrative apparatus. This type of regime is far less susceptible to deterrence and diplomatic pressure than the state it replaced. Consequently, a strategy pursued by the United States and Israel along these lines could push Iran toward prolonged fragmentation and civil conflict where competing factions fight for power, but that will not advance their broader strategic objectives.
History suggests the answer to that question will arrive not in a formal announcement but in a series of ambiguous, violent incidents in places the American public is not watching. The lesson of Vietnam, and of every other conflict in which decapitation was mistaken for victory. Wars do not end because one side decides to stop fighting. They end when both sides have exhausted their will. Washington may have struck a decisive blow. But it may also have simply made its adversary impossible to find.
References
- Small Wars Journal. “We Bombed the Wrong Target.” March 2, 2026. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/03/02/we-bombed-the-wrong-target/
- History.com. “Operation Rolling Thunder.” https://www.history.com/articles/operation-rolling-thunder
- Vohra, Anchal. “Iran’s Proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen Are Out for Themselves for Now.” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2026. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/02/iran-war-hezbollah-lebabon-houthis-yemen-iraq-proxies/
- Alexander Hamilton Society. “Iran’s Proxy Strategy and the Extent of Surrogate Autonomy.” May 2025. https://alexanderhamiltonsociety.org/security-strategy/issue-two/irans-proxy-strategy-and-the-extent-of-surrogate-autonomy/
- Crenshaw, Martha. Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences. Routledge, 2011. https://www.routledge.com/Explaining-Terrorism-Causes-Processes-and-Consequences/Crenshaw/p/book/9780415780513 See also: Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism, 3rd ed. Columbia University Press, 2017. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/inside-terrorism/9780231174770/
- Middle East Institute. “Iran’s Axis of Resistance after the 12-Day War.” December 2025. https://mei.edu/publication/irans-axis-of-resistance-after-the-12-day-war-adaptation-restructuring-and-reconstitution/
- Small Wars Journal. “We Bombed the Wrong Target.” March 2, 2026. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/03/02/we-bombed-the-wrong-target/
- Saikal, Amin. “How the Iranian Revolution Has Survived 40 Years.” The Iran Primer, USIP, April 2019. http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2019/apr/16/how-iranian-revolution-has-survived-40-years
