In the fog of a war that has already claimed Iran’s supreme leader and its top military brass, a new and perhaps more dangerous threat is emerging from the rubble of Tehran’s shattered command structure: a Revolutionary Guard Corps that, by design, no longer needs orders from above. Sources with direct knowledge of the situation confirm that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) continues to prosecute strikes across the region not under the direction of the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, but according to pre-programmed autonomous protocols embedded deep within its decentralized “mosaic defense” architecture. The result is a war machine that has become, in the most literal sense, self-propelling — and increasingly difficult for anyone to stop.
A New Supreme Leader With Limited Command
Mojtaba Khamenei was formally elected Supreme Leader on 8 March 2026, succeeding his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening wave of the US-Israeli “Operation Epic Fury” on 28 February. The transition of supreme authority was conducted under extraordinarily compressed circumstances: the Assembly of Experts was struck by Israeli aircraft during the succession deliberations on 3 March, reportedly killing the council secretary and vote-counting officials, with the ballot box destroyed in the attack.
Yet the younger Khamenei inherits a title far more symbolic than operational. The IRGC, which for decades answered “directly and exclusively” to the Supreme Leader, has already migrated its command authority downward — not as a consequence of crisis, but as a matter of deliberate pre-war design. The institutional loyalty is to the Islamic Revolutionary system, not to any individual who sits atop it.
“Our military units are now, in fact, independent and somewhat isolated, and they are acting based on general instructions given to them in advance.”
— Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, 1 March 2026
The admission by Foreign Minister Araghchi, made in a post on X on the first day of full-scale hostilities, was remarkable in its candor. It simultaneously explained the tempo of Iranian strikes and signalled the limits of Tehran’s ability to restrain them. The man nominally at the apex of Iran’s military chain of command cannot reliably reach the men pulling the triggers.
The Mosaic Defense: Architecture of Deliberate Fragmentation
The doctrine now shaping the battlefield was not improvised. It was the product of more than two decades of methodical observation and institutional learning. Iranian military planners watched the United States dismantle centralized regimes in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) within weeks, and drew a single, unambiguous conclusion: centralization is a vulnerability; distribution is survival.
Under the direction of Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, who served as IRGC commander from 2007, the Guards were restructured into 31 semi-autonomous provincial commands. Each command constitutes, in the words of The Soufan Center’s analysis, a full “military” at its disposal: independent intelligence capabilities, its own weapons stockpile, organic command-and-control, and pre-delegated authority to launch strikes if communication with the center is severed.
The restructuring was formalized in 2008 with the creation of 31 provincial corps — one for each of Iran’s provinces, with Tehran receiving two. Each unit was designed to operate independently for months without resupply from the capital. Decentralized munitions workshops, drone assembly facilities, and media/cyber units were integrated into every node. Defense expert Farzin Nadimi has described the model succinctly: “Every province is a mosaic. When cut off from the center, they don’t dissolve — they activate.”
This architecture has proven its logic. Despite the confirmed deaths of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, IRGC Commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, and dozens of senior officials in the opening salvo, Iranian missiles and drones continue to fly. By Day 6 of the conflict, launch rates had fallen by approximately 90 percent from their Day 1 peak — a significant attrition — but the institution itself has not collapsed. The 31 mosaics have activated.
Documented Incidents of Autonomous and Uncoordinated Strikes
The operational manifestation of this autonomy is now visible in a series of incidents that bear the hallmarks of decentralized decision-making rather than coordinated strategic direction.
Among the most telling admissions of the war came when Foreign Minister Araghchi attributed an Iranian strike on Oman — a neutral state that had historically served as a discreet back-channel between Tehran and Washington — to “autonomous units who could not be directly reached.” The strike on a country explicitly outside the theatre of conflict was not a strategic decision; it was the output of a cell operating on standing pre-war instructions with no ability to receive updated targeting guidance from a center that no longer functioned with full coherence.
Three Missiles Into Turkey: A NATO Red Line Tested Without Authorization
The most consequential example of autonomous escalation may be the repeated firing of Iranian ballistic missiles into Turkish airspace. NATO air defenses intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile on 4 March as it crossed Iraqi and Syrian airspace toward Turkey. A second was intercepted on 9 March. A third interception was confirmed on 13 March. In each instance, Iranian authorities denied intentional targeting of Turkey, attributing the incidents to “technical anomalies.”
Turkey, a NATO member, has been notably accommodating toward Tehran since the war began, opposing the US-Israeli campaign and refusing to open its airspace for offensive operations. The repeated incursions into Turkish airspace are therefore not plausibly intentional Iranian policy — they are almost certainly the product of mid-ranking IRGC commanders operating under pre-delegated launch authority, without situational awareness of the diplomatic sensitivities, firing pre-authorized strike packages at coordinates that inadvertently fall within or near Turkish sovereign territory. The Turkish Foreign Minister conveyed Ankara’s protest to his Iranian counterpart after the first incident, warning that “next time, Turkey will respond in kind.” NATO, meanwhile, has raised its security posture and confirmed it “stands firm in its defence of all Allies,” while formally stating it is not a party to the conflict.
The IRGC’s decentralized structure — its greatest wartime strength — has become its most dangerous liability when cells fire without full situational awareness of who lies downrange.
Strikes on Gulf States: Civilian Targets and Degrading Coherence
Reports from across the Gulf Cooperation Council document strikes on civilian infrastructure in Gulf monarchies that appear inconsistent with any coherent Iranian strategic calculus. Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City and the Mesaieed Industrial Area were struck by Iranian drones; Qatar subsequently arrested ten individuals confirmed as IRGC cell members who had been conducting reconnaissance and preparing sabotage operations inside Qatari territory. In Bahrain, four nationals were arrested on 12 March and charged with espionage for the IRGC, having used high-resolution photographic equipment to transmit coordinates of sensitive installations via encrypted software.
The pattern of IRGC sleeper cells operating in Gulf states, feeding targeting data to autonomous strike units, illustrates the full-spectrum decentralization of the mosaic model. Cells that “plan” and cells that “execute” are functionally separated; the intelligence chain and the strike chain run in parallel, loosely coupled at best.
The Oman Anomaly and the Akrotiri Strike
Iran’s strikes have reached well beyond the immediate theatre. Shahed drones struck the British Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri in Cyprus on 2 March. Western intelligence sources and Cypriot officials assessed this as likely the work of Hezbollah acting through Iranian proxy channels rather than a direct IRGC operation — itself a demonstration of the multi-layered, semi-autonomous nature of Iran’s extended strike network. The United States subsequently ordered the evacuation of non-essential personnel in Cyprus and issued a travel warning, illustrating the geographic breadth of operational risk generated by the mosaic system.
The IRGC’s Deputy Defense Minister Reza Talaeinik articulated the institution’s logic in a television interview during the first week of hostilities: each figure in the command structure has named successors spanning three ranks, ready to assume authority instantly. The institution was designed to be decapitation-proof, and by that design criterion, it has succeeded.
But the same architecture that enables institutional survival generates what analysts are calling a “double-edged sword” dynamic. The decentralization that makes Iran impossible to neutralize through leadership strikes is the same decentralization that produces strikes on NATO territory, attacks on neutral states, and “wild attacks on civilian targets” in the Gulf without any individual in Tehran authorizing them.
A data analysis published on 8 March by independent researchers captured the paradox precisely: the 31 IRGC provincial commands “with pre-delegated launch authority are firing pre-authorized strike packages without central coordination. This means the regime cannot be decapitated; missiles keep flying. But the same decentralization that enables survival prevents the complex multi-axis offensive operations that would actually threaten US interests at scale.”
The implication for conflict management is stark. Even if the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Foreign Minister Araghchi, or any surviving senior official wished to de-escalate, to halt a specific strike, to give assurances to Ankara about Turkish airspace, or to spare a neutral mediating state, the structural reality of the mosaic doctrine places severe limits on their ability to do so. The cells have their instructions. They are operating.
Sustained US-Israeli strikes targeting not just senior commanders but mid-ranking officers — the cohort now empowered to make decisions — may progressively erode the institutional coherence that keeps autonomous cells within even the loose parameters of Iran’s pre-war strategic guidance. The more thoroughly the command architecture is degraded, the more erratic and unpredictable the residual cells become. At some point, decapitation strategy may produce not Iranian surrender but Iranian incoherence: a distributed force conducting strikes that serve no strategic logic discernible to any party, including Tehran.
Strategic Implications for Regional Actors
For Turkey, the situation carries specific, immediate dangers. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a critical artery supplying European markets and roughly one-third of Israel’s oil imports, runs through territory within range of IRGC autonomous cells. Azerbaijan has already reported the foiling of “terrorist” sabotage plots linked to the IRGC targeting the BTC infrastructure. Whether such an attack would represent a deliberate Iranian strategic decision or the autonomous action of an activated provincial cell may, from the perspective of the pipeline, be a distinction without a difference.
For Cyprus — already struck at Akrotiri, already under US evacuation advisories — the mosaic doctrine means that the island’s exposure is not primarily a function of decisions taken in Tehran. It is a function of what autonomous cells and proxy networks, operating under general pre-war instructions, assess as appropriate target sets in an escalating conflict where the center cannot modulate the edges.
For the international community attempting to open humanitarian or diplomatic channels, the mosaic doctrine presents a fundamental structural obstacle. When Araghchi says that Iran’s units “act on general instructions given in advance,” he is not being evasive; he is describing, with unusual precision, the institutional reality. Cease-fire negotiations require an interlocutor who can actually enforce compliance. In the current configuration, it is not clear that any Iranian official has that capability with respect to all 31 activated mosaics simultaneously.
The IRGC’s mosaic defense is working as designed. Iran’s military capacity has not collapsed following the most extensive decapitation campaign in the history of modern warfare. The missiles continue to fly.
But the doctrine’s success in ensuring institutional survival has introduced a category of risk that its architects may not have fully modeled: the risk that autonomous cells, operating on standing instructions without real-time guidance, produce escalations that no Iranian decision-maker authorized or desires — strikes on NATO allies, attacks on neutral mediators, assaults on civilian infrastructure in neutral states — whose consequences cascade in directions that no party to the conflict controls or foresees.
The war that began on 28 February 2026 may have entered a phase in which its most dangerous vectors are no longer controlled by the US, Israel, or the Iranian government. They are controlled by 31 semi-autonomous mosaics, firing on instructions issued before the war began, in a strategic environment that has already changed beyond recognition.
“Decentralized Mosaic Defense enables us to decide when — and how — war will end.”
— Foreign Minister Araghchi, 1 March 2026
The question now is whether anyone, including Tehran, retains that decision.
Artwork: Perplexity