Opinion: Iran's way of warfare is being tested to its limits

"We will not initiate war, but we possess overwhelming power to confront any aggression,” Iranian military commander Hossein Salami declared a year ago, just months before he was killed in an Israeli air strike.

Iran’s way of warfare is best understood as a layered system of forward defence, rather than as conventional territorial defence. Tehran has sought to keep the decisive fights away from its core through a combination of allied non-state partners abroad, long-range missiles and one-way attack drones, dual military institutions at home, and the shadow - rather than the possession - of a possible nuclear deterrent. 

The current US-Israeli campaign has illuminated both the sophistication and the fragility of that force design. Iran has proven harder to paralyse than many assumed, yet much less able than its rhetoric implied to deny a first-rate air campaign over its own territory. 

Iran’s way of warfare is now being tested to its limits.

The model began to be forged during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. Under sustained pressure, the Islamic Republic institutionalised revolutionary light infantry, infiltration, dispersal, martyrdom culture, and later naval swarming. 

Read more: Iran's way of warfare is being tested to its limits Opinion by Omar Ashour