Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has tightened its control over wartime decisions despite the loss of senior commanders, according to senior sources, boosting the hardline strategy behind Tehran’s drone and missile campaign across the region.
Anticipating the decapitation of its leadership, the Guard had already delegated functions to lower ranks before Saturday’s US and Israeli attack, a resilience-building strategy that could also risk miscalculation or a broader war, with mid-level officers empowered to attack neighboring countries.
This Wednesday, Iran fired at Türkiye, a NATO member country.
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Inside Iran, the Revolutionary Guard’s central role at all levels of the system and its draconian approach to security could also make it more difficult for protests to erupt, undermining any U.S. or Israeli hopes that their attack will spur revolt and regime change.
The selection of the next supreme leader, following the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, could further cement the Guard’s role, said Kasra Aarabi, head of research on the Revolutionary Guard at the Union Against Nuclear Iran, a U.S.-based policy organization.
Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, widely seen as a likely candidate, has very close ties to the Revolutionary Guards, exercising significant control over it and enjoying broad support, including from the most radical ranks.
“If the conflict suddenly stops and the regime survives, we can be sure that the Revolutionary Guard will play an even more important role,” Aarabi said.
Decentralization strategy
Reuters spoke to six Iranian and regional sources with in-depth knowledge of the Revolutionary Guards for this article, all of whom confirmed that it has taken on a much larger role in the hierarchy since the war began on Saturday and is now involved in all major decisions.
A security official close to the Guard said that the new Guard chief, Ahmad Vahidi, is present at all high-level meetings and that his main objective is always the survival of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary system and its goals.
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Deputy Defense Minister and Guard member Reza Talaeinik outlined the elite force’s efforts to build resilience in a television interview on Tuesday, saying each number in the command structure had named successors three ranks down, ready to replace them.
“The role of each unit and section has been organized in such a way that if any commander is killed, a successor immediately takes his place,” he said.
Israeli strikes last year killed the general chief of the Guard and the heads of its intelligence, aerospace and economic units. On Saturday, an airstrike killed the last head of the Guard, Mohammad Pakpour.
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Decentralization has been part of the Guard’s attack doctrine for nearly 20 years and was developed after the collapse of Iraqi forces during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Aarabi said.
“The idea was to decentralize so that if a specific province was attacked, it could defend itself and maintain the authority and rule of the regime,” he said.
External and internal threats
Fundamentally, the plan was designed to ensure that the Guard could continue to act as both the main spearhead of Iran’s military response to external attacks and responsible for the Islamic Republic’s internal security, he added.
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The approach appears to be working for now, although ongoing attacks that continue to eliminate Guard commanders, both senior and junior, may eventually test the Guard’s ability to maintain strategic coherence.
Admittedly, the Revolutionary Guard is not an entirely homogeneous unit, with its own factional rivalries, personal disputes, and differences over the group’s role. But one of the sources said they are “more united than ever when Iran is under attack.”
There may also be signs, five days after the Israeli and U.S. strikes, that the command structure is beginning to deteriorate, Aarabi said, pointing to what he called increasingly violent attacks on civilian targets in the Gulf monarchies.
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It is unclear to what extent this may also reflect a deliberate strategy to show that the attack on Iran was a mistake with global implications.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran’s response to the attack had already been planned.
“These units are operating based on general instructions given to them in advance, rather than direct, real-time commands from the current political leadership,” he told Al Jazeera.
Although the Revolutionary Guard is now involved in almost every strategic decision made in Iran — even beyond the central role it played before the war — it can also count on a surviving political leadership, in which the three most important men are former members of the Guard.
Political and economic empire
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was founded shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution to defend the new republic against internal and external enemies and as a counterweight to the regular armed forces.
Reporting directly to the supreme leader, it emerged as a state within a state, combining military power, an intelligence network, and economic power, all focused on maintaining the survival of Iran’s Islamic system of power.
That role was put to the test when Iraq invaded the country months after the revolution, triggering a grueling eight-year war that was a formative experience for many of Iran’s current generation of leaders.
Among the prominent Iranian figures who served in the Guard during the war are the three non-clerics who have held the most senior positions in Iran since Khamenei’s death.
President Masoud Pezeshkian was a field surgeon, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf fought on the front lines before heading the Guard’s air unit, while Ali Larijani, Khamenei’s top aide, was a staff officer behind the lines.
Beginning in the early 2000s, as the war generation began to assume more leadership positions and Iran’s long confrontation with the West accelerated, the role of the Revolutionary Guard in the Iranian state also began to increase.
The Revolutionary Guard was responsible for Iran’s nuclear program, a project that Tehran has always claimed to have purely peaceful purposes, but which Western countries believe to be a front for the construction of an atomic bomb.
As sanctions imposed on the nuclear project took effect, the Guard took on a role in the economy, with its construction division winning major contracts, including in the all-important energy sector.
The Guard also increasingly served as a conduit for Shiite proxies across the Middle East, while its volunteer paramilitary militia, the Basij, was used to quell internal unrest.
