America is Bogged Down Against a Militia With a State

[originally published on DAWN]

Every war the West has fought in the post-9/11 "War on Terror" era has ended in some form of stalemate or outright defeat. Tactical battlefield successes never consolidated into sustainable strategic outcomes of security and stability — neither for America nor the region. While the U.S.-led coalition toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 quickly, it lost the war in the subsequent quagmire, fighting violent non-state actors across a spectrum of insurgent groups and terrorist organizations. These non-state actors are geared towards endurance, winning through perseverance outside the binary western concepts of victory and defeat.

Fast forward to 2026: America is again in the thick of a Middle Eastern war it does not own, control or understand. United States President Donald Trump was sucked into this strategic disaster by a subversive Israeli Prime Minister benefitting from permacrisis and managed chaos. Somewhere between wishful thinking and neoconservative regime change activism, war planners in Tel Aviv and Washington are realizing that they are effectively fighting a war against a militia with a state.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) have been preparing for nearly five decades for a war of attrition with a technologically superior enemy, embracing an insurgency mindset, culture and system. Israel and America are now at war with the largest militia network in the world — a network of networks engineered to endure attrition indefinitely.

The IRGC is not merely another hierarchical Middle Eastern parallel military akin to the Republican Guards of Ba'athist Syria and Iraq. It is a parallel state that exists as the most important network within a hub-and-spoke system resembling something between a wheel and an all-channel network shape. That is, the IRGC system combines the "wheel" characteristic of a central hub — such as the Office of the Supreme Leader — to set strategic intent, with a resilient "all-channel" structure that allows its regional nodes and provincial "tiles" to operate with decentralized agency. During peace time, other hubs in the system have exercised some balancing power. Now, with the country in a total war footing, the IRGC has effectively sidelined the clergy, ensuring the new hardline Supreme Leader is operationally incapacitated.

Anticipating war, the IRGC actioned its Mosaic Defense doctrine: a form of mission command whereby vague strategic intent is executed through dispersed cells on the tactical level. More than 60 local commands plan and execute operations with little integration into a central command and control pillar. While most military organizations — including Iran's regular military, the Artesh — display a U-shaped hierarchical command structure, the IRGC resembles a horizontal M-shaped structure where local cells can innovate and take initiative. Unitary structures tend to be highly centralized, placing decision-making at the top, while multidivisional structures like the IRGC's consist of decentralized, semi-autonomous units with decision-making on the divisional level.

In addition to the nearly 200,000 uniformed men organized in a flat heterarchy, the IRGC has penetrated civil society with a million men and women organized within the paramilitary network of the Basij — its internal security force. Thus, the IRGC reflects a state within a state, with the Basij constituting the subversive link into a widely aggrieved and alienated Iranian society.

Zooming out, the IRGC has weaved its networks across the Middle East. Below the visible "Axis of Resistance" — another network of violent non-state actors trained, equipped and at times directed by IRGC Quds Force personnel — sits a vast underbelly of interlocutors supporting the broader network. Financiers, commodity traders, logisticians, clerics and information warriors constitute the iceberg below the waterline, ensuring the flow of capital, arms, people and ideas.

Resilience is the central organizing principle of this network. Decapitation can degrade the core. Linkages between the various interlocutors can be cut. The networks' infrastructure can be destroyed. But ultimately, networks are organic entities that reconstitute and adapt, bypassing eliminated nodes or building new connections where linkages are broken. The fact that the IRGC is a quasi-state within the Iranian state means it has degrees of bandwidth across all domains of statecraft and governance that other militia networks only dream of achieving.

American and Israeli decapitation strikes, alongside command-and-control degradation, have little effect on the IRGC's ability and willingness to resist and fight. IRGC swarms on land and at sea — an asymmetric tactic involving the coordinated, multi-axis attack of numerous small and fast platforms spanning boats, drones and missiles to overwhelm and saturate an adversary's defensive systems — still dictate operational tempo and control escalation dominance over two weeks into the war. Dug in, the network can disrupt airspace and maritime corridors at will with a single missile or drone strike per day.

Networks will not be decapitated, and network degradation is a costly and lengthy endeavor neither Israel, the United States nor the world economy can afford — both in terms of resources and time. Unlike the hierarchies of the highly centralized, authoritarian regimes of Saddam, Syria's Hafez and Bashar al-Assad and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, networks display far fewer vulnerabilities. In Syria and Iraq, the remnants of the coercive systems that drove these dictatorships continue to haunt communities. What remains of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq are the remnants of Saddam's old Ba'athist network, following several iterations of insurgency metamorphosis.

Thus, network degradation requires a long-term effort of undermining network cohesion. Iran's "Guardians of the Revolution" rely on transactional profiteering and transformational ideology to maintain such cohesion. IRGC-affiliated companies and individuals control nearly half of Iran's economy, profiting from the West's sanctions regime. The conglomerate has created a patron-client system, generating billions of dollars in profit while keeping members aligned. Unlike Al Qaeda, IS or the Taliban, the IRGC can draw on the region's biggest hydrocarbon rentier state to fund their disruptive activities. While these shadowy financial networks can be degraded, they will not be destroyed, as Trump's last attempt at "maximum pressure" proved. Even on the off chance that the system disintegrates and splinters, many of the transnational shadowy networks will likely remain operational.

Transformational cohesion built around interpersonal relationships and charismatic leadership — alongside ideology — is even harder to erode. Although ideology is a far less powerful mobilize tool today than in 1979, the resistance narrative of the "victorious underdog" wrapped in Shia revolutionary doctrine still carries weight. It provides a grand strategic narrative that binds the network. Neoconservative narratives of imperial regime change projected by Israel and the United States will do more to confirm the IRGC's worldview than challenge it.

Even if Israel and the United States can keep their air campaign going for months, eliminating Iranian leadership, the best-case scenario is that the network splinters into smaller groups operating in the shadows. Embedded in transnational networks, they would sustain themselves, even amid the turmoil of sociopolitical transformation in Iran — should Iranians return to the streets and manage to bring down the Islamic Republic in the first place. Still, that scenario would produce a protracted and bloody civil war, in which these networks compete until formally integrating into a new emergent structure.

Facing this reality is a narcissistic real estate mogul from New York who, surrounded by yes-men, believes that coercion can produce a better deal. He has been played by a man in Israel who gleefully tail wagged the American dog for decades in a tactical game of "mowing" other people's lawns on the U.S. dime. Both have far fewer means and political support available than President George W. Bush in 2003 to defeat a gigantic militia with a state.

Paradoxically, it was ultimately this Iranian network of networks that defeated America in Iraq. The same may come to define U.S. interests in Iran.