As Israel’s targeted strikes inside Iran continue, the longer-term implications for the Iranian regime’s military doctrine and leadership are beginning to surface. A sober analysis reveals that the consequences leave Tehran with little room to manoeuvre.

For decades the Islamic Republic has built its military doctrine on three key pillars. First, a network of Islamist militias across the Middle East, either created or co-opted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the regime’s ideological army. The IRGC has worked for decades to exploit vacuums in neighbouring countries to radicalise, recruit and mobilise foreign nationals into organised armed proxy groups loyal to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Given the Shia Islamist nature of Iran’s theocracy, the IRGC primarily targeted Shia communities across the region, manufacturing ideologically compliant militias from radicalised constituencies. The creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 became the gold standard for this approach – what would become known as the ‘Hezbollah-ization’ of the region.

Crucially, the regime did not let sectarianism limit its ambitions. It leveraged the antisemitic and anti-Western tenets of its ideology to co-opt and collaborate with Sunni Islamist groups, including Hamas, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. Backed by billions of dollars for arms and military training, this strategy enabled the regime to build an extensive and lethal network of Islamist militias.

A comprehensive ballistic missile and drone programme served as the military doctrine’s second pillar. The Iran-Iraq War ignited the development of a self-sufficient ballistic missile programme. But with little expertise in missile technology, senior members of the IRGC turned to rogue foreign regimes for assistance. What was initially supported by dictators from North Korea, Libya, and Syria, became a booming domestic missile programme.

While the Iran-Iraq War was the key to driving self-sufficiency, the expansion of IRGC’s ballistic missile programme was underpinned by the ideological thirst to eradicate Israel, with intent to place every Israeli city within its range. As the so-called father of the IRGC’s ballistic missile programme, Hassan Tehrani-Moghadam, declared: ‘When I die, write on my grave: here lies the person who wanted to destroy Israel.’ With its missile programme established, the IRGC began developing a lethal drone capability, extending its military reach into previously inaccessible territories, including Ukraine.

The third pillar of the military doctrine is the IRGC’s nuclear weapons programme. The Islamic Republic nuclear programme has always been grounded on ambitions to weaponise. It’s for this reason that Khamenei gave oversight and control of the programme to the IRGC, and not to civilian elites.

While the IRGC has spent time, resources and blood over the decades in its costly pursuit of the nuclear weaponisation threshold, this pillar has always remained more aspirational than assured. Yet the revelation of secret uranium enrichment facilities just hours before Israel’s strikes on Friday – coupled with enrichment at near weapons-grade levels – suggests it may have been closer than ever to completing this critical component of its military strategy.

Crucially, these three pillars were not simply for deterrence or defensive purposes. The military doctrine was specifically designed to advance the ideological objectives of the Islamic Republic, not least the annihilation of Israel, driven by its extreme antisemitism.

Until the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, the doctrine was performing remarkably well for the IRGC. Not only had it encircled Israel via its proxies, it had constructed a land-bridge that connected Lebanon to Iran, enabling a constant flow of weapons and supplies to its militia network. This situation provided Tehran with a relatively free hand to proliferate its missiles and drones across the region. Meanwhile, within Iran, the combination of a power-projecting regime and a retreating United States in the Middle East provided Khamenei with the confidence and space to advance the regime’s quest to acquire nuclear weapons.

But 7 October was a major strategic error for Khamenei. Israel’s response and refusal to return to the pre-7 October status quo effectively dismantled the entire first pillar of the military doctrine. Crucially, it decapitated Hezbollah of both its senior leadership and capabilities – removing a major deterrent that had previously prevented a direct Israeli attack in Iran. The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December 2024 would land the final decisive blow to the IRGC’s ambition to reconstruct and rearm Hezbollah, with the collapse of the Baathist regime cutting Tehran’s land-bridge: its main artery for support. As the ongoing conflict between the Islamic Republic and Israel continues to escalate, the remaining IRGC proxy forces have been left in disarray. They either lack the capabilities to inflict meaningful damage on Israel – as with the Houthis in Yemen – or have shown little willingness to intervene, as with Shia militias in Iraq.

Likewise, Israel’s post-7 October strategy exposed the weaknesses of the once-feared Iranian ballistic missile programme. The inability of the IRGC’s two direct strikes in 2024 to outflank the superior Israeli air defence system revealed major vulnerabilities. Although the current Iranian ballistic missile barrages on Israeli civilian areas have occasionally penetrated the Iron Dome, the success rate remains at round six per cent.

With two pillars of the Iranian regime’s military doctrine effectively defunct, only its nuclear ambitions remain. But Israel’s ongoing strikes have severely set back this effort – destroying key IRGC uranium facilities and eliminating nuclear scientists, with more attacks likely in the days ahead. To make matters worse for the Islamic Republic, Israeli strikes have also wiped out the most senior military leaders, causing irreparable institutional damage. To put this into perspective, within hours of Israel’s military operation on Friday, the highest military authority in the Islamic Republic – Brigadier General Mohammad Bagheri – and Brigadier General Gholam-Ali Rashid, who was responsible for controlling the armed forces and coordinating its branches during times of conflict, were eliminated.

With its military doctrine in tatters, Iran’s regime has only one remaining card: terrorism against Israeli, Jewish – even American – soft targets globally. The regime is well-versed in such operations, with a fully-fledged terrorist apparatus incorporated within its military-security machinery. In fact, until recently, deploying such asymmetric tactics against soft targets had been the Islamic Republic’s preferred method of operation to compete with the superior conventional capabilities of the United States and Israel.

Crucially, at the time of writing, the branches responsible for spearheading these operations overseas – namely, the IRGC Quds Force, IRGC Intelligence Organization and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (or MOIS) – remain relatively intact. Perhaps more worryingly, the Iranian regime already has strong infrastructure abroad – including in Europe – to facilitate such attacks, including homegrown terrorism. If Khamenei opts for this approach, it would be reminiscent of the final days of ISIS when the Jihadist group escalated its campaign of terror abroad in a desperate attempt to deter the military operations against the Caliphate. But as was the case with ISIS, terrorist attacks on civilian populations are highly unlikely to change Israel’s calculus. If anything, given that Israel now controls Iran’s skies, any escalation by the regime is almost certainly going to be met with a fierce aerial response.

In many ways, the current situation has produced the ‘Syria-isation’ of Khamenei’s regime. In 2017, Assad experienced what Khamenei is currently undergoing. His regime lost complete air superiority to Israel and was left defenceless. This meant the IDF could target whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted. The result was precision air strikes against military infrastructure and Baathist elites – something that hollowed out the regime from within, opening up a space for the toppling of Assad. It would take at least seven years for Assad to be deposed from the moment he lost air superiority in 2017. In between, in a bid to consolidate his rule, he waged a domestic campaign of suppression.

Today, the ‘Syria-isation’ of Iran’s regime could produce a strikingly similar outcome. As Israel controls the skies, the regime is likely double-down on its efforts to control the streets. This makes a new wave of domestic crackdowns the most likely scenario at least in the near term. In the medium- to long-term, however, Israel’s air superiority suggests it may gradually hollow out the regime from within. This process could take months or even years, but the ‘Syria-isation’ of the Islamic Republic – and the erosion of its military doctrine – has opened the space for history to repeat itself: with Khamenei suffering the same fate as Assad. Given the deeply personalistic nature of the regime – where the Ayatollah has ensured every aspect of the system is contingent on his authority – the elimination of Khamenei could accelerate this process.