How is Iran STILL preventing again? Using a Mosaic Defence they discovered from the autumn of Saddam: DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

Thick smoke coils across Iran’s horizon; the acrid stink of burning oil hangs over its cities. In the Strait of Hormuz, tankers burn and drones strike. Violence spreads like infection.

Operation Epic Fury is now into its third week, and its effects are global. According to US Central Command, by March 12 combined US and Israeli forces had struck around 6,000 targets in Iran since operations began – working out at around 460 strikes per day.

Iran’s leadership is decapitated; its control centres in disarray, its nuclear programme in ruins.

And yet, the Iranians fight on. How? Because they have spent twenty years preparing for this moment.

Their strategy is known as Decentralised Mosaic Defence (DMD), built around a single brutal principle: that the ‘body’ keeps fighting even if the ‘head’ is cut off – which is exactly what the Americans did when they killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war.

Under DMD, authority is deliberately scattered across dozens of semi-independent nodes, each with its own intelligence, weapons and command structure. Units operate on standing orders; they do not wait for instructions from above.

As Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi declared on March 1: ‘Bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to conduct war…Decentralised Mosaic Defence enables us to decide when – and how – the war will end.’

Former Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commander-in-chief General Mohammad Jafari publicly revealed the defence plan in 2005; critically, it was born from watching the mistakes of the West – particularly the Americans – in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even as far back as the 1990s Balkan wars.

Those conflicts, along with the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, embedded a culture of endurance and resistance deep into the Iranian state.

As Araghchi confirmed: ‘We’ve had two decades to study defeats of the US military to our immediate east and west. We’ve incorporated lessons accordingly.’

The lesson from Iraq 2003 was inescapable: Saddam Hussein had a highly centralised military. Once the leadership was gone, the whole structure collapsed within weeks.

That’s not all they learnt from Western intervention in Iraq. In 1981, Israeli jets destroyed Saddam Hussein’s single above-ground reactor at Osirak. Once more Iran studied and learned.

They realised that, over recent years, the US has placed increasing faith in that single, brutal idea: remove the head and the body collapses. It worked, more or less, with Saddam Hussein. (It didn’t with Osama bin Laden, whose death did little to destroy Al Qaeda, while the assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not end the group’s terror either.)

But the Iranians knew that, eventually, the Americans would go straight for their Supreme Leader – and they had a plan to inoculate themselves when it happened.

They dispersed their nuclear infrastructure across the country, burying key sites deep underground. The principle was identical: never give the enemy a single target whose destruction can end the fight.

In both cases, Iran looked at what Iraq had done and built the exact opposite.

And, two decades on, the plan paid off the moment Khamenei was killed.

The IRGC has been divided into provincial commands across Iran’s 31 provinces. Each unit functions like a self-contained mini-military, with its own intelligence cells, and ground forces. Provincial commanders have full tactical authority: they can launch missile strikes, drone swarms, and even harass ships without seeking approval from above.

Iran has reportedly fired around 700 missiles and 3,600 drones since the war began, from units dispersed across the country.

Volume alone – cheaply produced – is part of the strategy. Iran has struck, among other things, neighbouring Gulf states, the UAE, shipping lanes, and even Dubai airport.

It is all designed to expand the battlefield: to overwhelm and to force the enemy to expend far more expensive weapons in response. And fighting indirectly – through proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen – sits at the heart of Iranian strategic thinking: if you can’t fight your enemy head-on, hit him through other means – and exhaust him.

And, to a degree at least, it is working.

Israel is running low on ballistic missile interceptors, which is exactly the exhaustion Iran’s doctrine is designed to cause.

And this is their second strategy: cost asymmetry. An Iranian Shahed-136 drone costs perhaps $20,000–$50,000 to produce. To shoot it down can require interceptors costing anywhere from tens of thousands – such as Israel’s Iron Dome missiles at around $50,000 each – to Patriot missile system interceptors which cost $3-4million.

The Strait of Hormuz closure is part of the same logic: it costs Iran relatively little militarily to effectively close the strait by attacking shipping, but the global price is enormous.

Oil is hovering close to $100 a barrel. US petrol prices are up 23 per cent since the war began. The goal is not to win militarily in a conventional sense, but to make the war so politically and economically expensive that the US and Israel eventually tire.

It is not a flawless system. The Iranians are getting hammered. While they are smart, the Israelis are too; and no one can match the genuinely awesome military power of the United States.

More than this, decentralisation cuts both ways: autonomous units mean unpredictable behaviour. More actors making independent decisions means higher risk of miscalculation or unintended escalation.

While elite units can hold together under the kind of intense bombardment Iran is experiencing, less experienced provincial units are more likely to implode into confusion and disorder.

Much of this is already happening. As I wrote on these pages, there is internal chaos among parts of its security forces, which the Israelis have utterly penetrated.

The doctrine also assumes Iran has enough missiles and drones to sustain a long war. But with production facilities being bombed, resupply is increasingly in doubt. If the Israelis are running low, so are the Iranians.

The real question now is whether the US and its allies have the interceptors, the stamina and, above all, the political will to keep going.

The mosaic is cracked. But it has not yet shattered.