Outgunned, But Not Outplayed: Iran’s Theory of Victory

Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide. Nineteen weeks ago, Iran faced the combined might of the most powerful country in the world and the most advanced military in the Middle East. Today, it is dictating the terms of the peace. When the memorandum of understanding was signed last month, President Donald Trump declared, “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” and told the ships of the world to start their engines. Iran’s response was to keep striking and impose toll collection on the world’s most critical shipping lane while expanding its influence in Iraq, where it is increasingly seen as the champion of Muslim resistance against American aggression. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — which between them absorbed thousands of Iranian missiles and drones during the war — have since sent condolence delegations to Tehran for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral. The Gulf states have drawn their own conclusions about who won. In the 19th century, the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed that war is politics by other means. In this conflict, only one side truly acted on that insight. While the United States and Israel waged a war they believed would be defined by military force, Iran had a theory of victory its adversaries never understood: a regime built for survival, manipulating global perception and economic levers, and converting military inferiority into geopolitical leverage. The result was a fragile ceasefire during which Tehran negotiated from a position of greater leverage than it held before the war began. We seek here to explain how Iran pulled it off — and what Washington and Jerusalem failed to understand. Washington and Jerusalem’s failure has already been documented in these pages and elsewhere. This piece looks at the outcome from another angle: that the result aligns with Iran’s strategy all along. Iran fought a different war than the one it was offered, and it prepared to fight that war for twenty years. The doctrine behind it has a name. In 2005, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Center for Strategy, under Mohammad Ali Jafari and the ideologue Hassan Abbasi, formalized what Iranian planners called the mosaic defense: a decentralized command structure designed to survive exactly the kind of decapitation strikes that opened this war. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated explicitly as the campaign got underway, “We’ve had two decades to study defeats of the U.S. military to our immediate east and west. We’ve incorporated lessons accordingly.” Decentralized command is not a foreign concept to the U.S. military. It has its own name, mission command, and its own doctrine: Subordinate commanders, given clear intent, are supposed to make better decisions faster than a single person higher up the chain is capable of making. Iran followed this doctrine, while Washington pursued a list of targets. Tehran moved the contest onto terrain its adversaries were not equipped to contest: maritime coercion, economic disruption, information dominance, and political will. Iran’s theory of victory was simple: survive long enough to impose costs by striking the Gulf States and playing the Hormuz card. The question shifted from how long Iran could hold out to whether Washington and Jerusalem could stay the course — and to what end. Tehran understood the importance of Hormuz years long before Washington. Asked last month about the failure to anticipate Iran’s ability to shut down the strait, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was candid: “It took a while for them to understand how big that risk is.” It took a while because Washington had not planned for it. According to two officials familiar with the war’s initial planning, the administration underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the strait and could likely have prevented the closure had it positioned naval assets there from the outset. This omission is all the more remarkable given that the U.S. military had identified Hormuz as the key risk of a war with Iran for decades. Iranian planners had reached that conclusion years earlier — and built their strategy around it. It was not the only thing Washington failed to see coming. The United States and Israel entered the war with objectives that overlapped but never quite matched. Israel framed the conflict in existential terms: destroying Hizballah and eliminating Iran’s nuclear program outright. Washington focused on dismantling Iran’s military capabilities and severing its support for regional proxies, while its objectives shifted over time. The objectives drifted undeclared on Tehran’s terms, not Washington’s, from regime change to maritime stability once the Strait of Hormuz became the central strategic problem. Neither ally anchored its goals to a measurable end state, and the campaign’s methods reflected the same drift: Airpower and standoff strikes were designed to disrupt and punish, not compel change, degrading Iran’s missile inventory and nuclear infrastructure without destroying either, and battering Hizballah without touching its financial and political entrenchment in Lebanon. The pattern repeated everywhere: target things, but leave the problem standing. Public messaging compounded the mismatch. Officials spoke of “elimination,” “obliteration,” and “unconditional surrender,” language that exceeded what the campaign could deliver and cost Washington the confidence of its partners. A list of things to break is not a strategy, and Washington never provided one. The clearest proof came when Project Freedom, Trump’s plan to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, collapsed within days of launch when Saudi Arabia refused to provide basing, a credibility gap the maximalist rhetoric had helped create. Iran had studied the force structure it faced and designed its counter-campaign accordingly. Rather than contesting air superiority symmetrically, it sought to degrade the enabling systems that made U.S. and Israeli airpower effective — targeting not strike aircraft but the tankers, radar networks, communications nodes, and command and control platforms that sustained them. The goal was not to destroy U.S. airpower outright but to degrade it incrementally, imposing persistent costs on a force dependent on scarce, high-value assets. The cost exchange told its own story. Iran’s drones and missiles cost thousands of dollars apiece. The interceptors fired to stop them ran into millions. Sustained salvos burned through interceptor stockpiles that could not be replaced in time. A weaker power had turned its enemy’s reliance on a handful of expensive systems into a weapon of its own. U.S. and Israeli forces largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet and damaged its naval infrastructure. Yet these attacks reflected a mismatch between the targets engaged and the strategic problem the campaign ultimately exposed. The real problem was preserving the flow of commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s ability to threaten maritime traffic depends less on conventional naval forces than on asymmetric capabilities: mines, missiles, drones, and small attack craft. The mosaic defense was based in part on this mosquito fleet. The Black Sea offered a direct precedent. Ukraine, despite lacking a traditional navy, denied Russia effective maritime control through dispersed missile, drone, and standoff attacks. That experience should have warned U.S. planners that Iran could still threaten commercial shipping regardless of what happened to its conventional fleet. In the information domain, Iran proved more effective in shaping perceptions of the conflict. The regime framed its ability to absorb punishment while continuing to strike back as a narrative of resilience, reducing the coercive impact of the campaign. Iranian information warfare has grown over four decades from the revolutionary narratives of 1979, through the martyrdom imagery of the Iran-Iraq war, to the post-2009 crackdown on the Green Movement. What began as religious ideological propaganda has evolved into something far more sophisticated and multidimensional, aimed simultaneously at domestic, regional, and international audiences — including the American public. Iran pioneered a new form of strategic communication, using AI-generated animations that were surprisingly entertaining and — like all effective propaganda — contained a kernel of truth. The videos reached audiences far beyond the traditional battlespace, reinforcing perceptions that Tehran had withstood the best that a militarily superior coalition could throw at it without being decisively weakened — and they succeeded. In the United States, polling reflected a limited appetite for prolonged conflict and strong opposition to ground force escalation. The economic campaign was just as prepared. Tehran spent five years building an economy to evade sanctions. Iran’s tanker fleet grew from roughly 70 vessels in 2020 to nearly 550 by 2025 — infrastructure built years before the war, sustained by Chinese refineries that alone accounted for close to 90 percent of Iran’s foreign oil sales and nearly half its government budget. Iran’s kinetic targeting of Gulf Cooperation Council countries served a strategic purpose by sending an unambiguous message to Washington’s regional partners: supporting this campaign has a price. The cruise missile and drone strikes on Saudi territory made that price real. When Iran struck the United Arab Emirates’ oil terminal, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia closed their airspace to U.S. military aircraft, fearing more of the same on their own soil. Iran had shown, repeatedly, that it could reach Gulf capitals whenever it chose. The clearest example came with Project Freedom, an American plan to provide military escorts for oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia refused to allow use of its bases or airspace — even after direct personal intervention by Trump — citing lack of confidence in the coherence of U.S. strategy. The plan was shelved. Saudi Arabia was not the only regional partner alienated by the conduct of the campaign. The Emirates, bearing the brunt of Iranian attacks while watching its Gulf neighbors offer little solidarity, quit OPEC and threatened to leave the Arab League. Superpowers, it turns out, still need partners, but when Washington called for solidarity, those partners hesitated. Iran was imposing costs, and Washington offered no reason to pay the price. No honest accounting of this war can ignore what it cost Iran. Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. Its missile inventory fell from roughly 2,500 to between 1,000 and 1,200, with serviceable launchers down from about 480 to roughly 100. Its conventional navy effectively ceased to exist. Its nuclear enrichment infrastructure is offline. Its economy, already deteriorating before the war began, sustained months of further damage. On paper, this was a beating. “On paper” is the operative phrase. The United States and Israel wanted surrender and Iran’s collapse: a regime stripped of its ability to threaten the strait, sponsor proxies, or enrich uranium, brought to that state by force. Iran wanted something narrower: survival. This gave Tehran the capacity to keep imposing costs and a negotiating position strong enough to turn resilience into political leverage once the guns stopped. The money now flowing into Tehran can rebuild its nuclear program and replenish its missile inventory. Hizballah has been battered but not broken and can rely on Iran’s support to be rearmed. The strait closure remains a card Tehran can play again if it decides Washington has reneged. Iran got what it was fighting for. The negotiations told the true story. The United States has retreated from demands for unconditional surrender and the elimination of enrichment to something closer to capitulation. Under the framework agreement, Washington has dropped its insistence that Iran surrender its uranium stockpile outright, agreeing instead to let the material remain in place — reportedly secured by Iran against removal — while further talks proceed. Iran, for its part, has only hardened its position. Earlier this month, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi outlined a peace proposal to the United States that added demands for war reparations and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from areas near Iran to Tehran’s pre-war negotiating position. These are not the demands of a defeated nation, and the agreement signed this week did not require Iran to abandon them. What looked like a deadlock has been resolved — on Iranian terms. The deal’s own sequence settles the question regardless of how the next 60 days go. Before Iran has to resolve a single hard issue — the nuclear stockpile, the missile program, or its regional proxies — the United States lifts the naval blockade, withdraws its forces from Iran’s vicinity, issues sanctions waivers releasing oil revenue, and makes frozen Iranian assets available for transfer. Only once all of that is already underway does the memorandum itself call for negotiations on everything else. Talks on the remaining issues begin only in the agreement’s own language, “subject to the beginning of the implementation” of the blockade removal, the troop withdrawal, the sanctions waivers, and the asset release. As one analyst points out, “Pay first, verify later is not a strategy. It is leverage leaving the room.” The economic costs of the conflict will outlast the ceasefire regardless of how negotiations conclude. Prolonged disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz cascaded through global supply chains in ways few anticipated: driving up energy prices, but also disrupting the flow of fertilizers, helium, and plastics on which industries and consumers worldwide depend, including in the United States itself. The consequences for global food prices could persist well into 2027, with Northern Hemisphere planting seasons already affected. Even the deal’s signature achievement is incomplete: Oil prices fell more than 5 percent on the news, but Brent crude remains roughly $20 above pre-war levels, and dozens of tankers stranded for months will take time to clear before trade returns to anything resembling normal. The Iranian regime emerged from the conflict strengthened. It maintained internal cohesion under pressure, used the conflict to reinforce narratives of resistance and external threat — turning military pressure into a tool of domestic consolidation — and denied its adversaries the internal collapse they had hoped for. Of all Iran’s regional proxies, the Iraqi militias have proven the most consistent direct threat to U.S. forces — responsible for more than 180 attacks on U.S. bases in the 18 months before the war began, including the drone strike at Tower 22 that killed three American service members in January 2024. Deeply embedded in Iraq’s official security architecture, they emerge from this war with greater public standing and strategic importance — their relative weight within Iran’s proxy network having grown as Hizballah and Hamas absorbed losses, and a regional narrative the war itself helped write now working in their favor. The broader strategic costs are still accumulating. The gap between stated objectives and observable outcomes has introduced uncertainty about the credibility and predictability of U.S. policy — shaping how both partners and adversaries will assess future American commitments. The fracturing of Gulf cohesion and the economic volatility generated by the strait’s disruption are consequences that will define the strategic environment long after any agreement is reached. B.H. Liddell Hart wrote that the object of war is to attain a better peace. Judged against that standard, this war has not achieved its object for the United States or Israel. The Strait of Hormuz, initially peripheral to the campaign, emerged as its central vulnerability — and the deal’s headline concession turns out to be the one Iran never actually had to make. In exchange, Iran stands to receive billions of dollars in near-term relief and a far larger reconstruction fund down the line, while preserving its missile program, its support for regional proxies, and — for now — a uranium stockpile it has reportedly taken steps to keep secure rather than surrender. For Israel, the reckoning is starker still. Israel was not a party to the talks and, by its own officials’ account, had not even seen the text of the agreement it would have to live with. Hizballah gains new protection from Israeli strikes under the deal’s terms, and the missile program Israel considers existential goes unaddressed. Worse for Jerusalem, the Gulf states it hoped would drift toward Israel have done the opposite: maintaining and in some cases deepening their ties with Tehran, taking with them Israel’s hope of expanding the Abraham Accords on the strength of the campaign. The personal rupture between Washington and Jerusalem has been just as visible: When Netanyahu pressed for strikes in Beirut that risked the deal, Trump’s response was reportedly to call him and tell him he “would be in prison” without American protection. One Israeli diplomat summed up the result as “a glorious failure.” One Israeli analyst commented that Netanyahu may come to miss the days of confronting President Barack Obama, when Congress and American opinion still gave him room to push back. Facing Trump, those tools no longer exist. Israel has not simply lost this round — it may have lost the means to contest the next one. Washington, for its part, claimed a deal it had once promised would end in Iran’s unconditional surrender. It got close to the exact opposite: a regime intact, a nuclear stockpile it cannot remove without Tehran’s consent, and an adversary with every incentive to keep building its military and nuclear capability. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem has secured anything resembling a better peace. Tehran built toward this for 20 years. The mosaic defense doctrine that absorbed the opening strikes, the decision to make Hormuz the price of any peace, and the sanctions-proof economy assembled years before the first missile flew — none of it came together by accident in 16 weeks of fighting. The war has ended – but on terms written in Tehran. Pnina Shuker, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy and the James J. Shasha Center for Strategic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer in strategy, diplomacy, and security at Shalem Academic College. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Nexus and as deputy editor of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. She has also held research and leadership roles at the Institute for National Security Studies, the Lipkin-Shahak Program on National Security, and Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center. Andrew Milburn is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer with service in infantry and special operations. He served as a Marine air-ground task force planner and commanded an infantry battalion, a regiment, and a special operations task force. He later led a humanitarian organization operating on the front lines in Ukraine. He is the author of When the Tempest Gathers: A Marine Special Operations Commander at War. Image: Donald Holbert via DVIDS