According to a report by Al Jazeera, Abbas Araghchi stated that Iran has carefully studied scenarios of a potential large-scale war over the past twenty years in order to create a defensive structure capable of continuing the fight even after severe attacks on Iran’s capital.
Araghchi said in a message on March 1 that Iran has thoroughly examined the experiences of past wars involving the United States. According to him, the purpose of these studies was to develop a system that could continue fighting even if key facilities, senior commanders, and even the central command were destroyed, ensuring that such losses would not cripple the country’s war effort.
The report states that at the center of Iran’s defense doctrine is a military concept known as “decentralized mosaic defense.” This concept is based on the principle that in a potential war the country’s central structures may suffer severe damage, but due to the distributed nature of the defense system, the war would continue across different regions.
This doctrine is largely associated with the military structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and was further developed during the leadership of its former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari (2007–2019). Under this strategy, defense forces are divided into regional and semi-independent units so that the entire military capability is not dependent on a single central command.
Within this structure, the IRGC, the Basij, regular army units, missile forces, naval forces, and local command structures are all considered parts of a broad and distributed defense system. The goal of this system is to ensure that if one part of the defense network is destroyed, other parts can continue their operations.
According to this doctrine, even if senior leaders are killed the chain of command will not collapse, and even if communication networks are disrupted, regional units can still independently make battlefield decisions and continue operations. The report notes that Iranian military strategists believe such a distributed defense structure is a key guarantee for the survival of the system in the conditions of a prolonged war.
