Iran having sits at the center of this dementia and brain health question.

Iran’s military is struggling to coordinate its defense operations because it has lost its Supreme Leader and approximately 40 senior military commanders in a matter of weeks—a catastrophic loss of institutional knowledge and decision-making authority that has no precedent in modern Iranian military history. When the top leadership that understands strategic priorities, operational doctrine, and inter-service relationships is suddenly gone, the remaining forces face not just grief and demoralization, but a fundamental breakdown in how orders flow, how resources are allocated, and how different military branches work together. This article examines how Iran’s military is attempting to maintain operations despite this unprecedented leadership vacuum, what gaps have emerged in its operational capacity, and how a decentralization strategy meant to prevent exactly this scenario is creating new coordination problems of its own.

The losses have been staggering. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed along with at least 16 other high-ranking figures in strikes between February 28 and March 20, 2026—casualties that included the IRGC Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and IRGC Commander Hossein Salami. Each of these men represented decades of experience, personal relationships with other commanders, and knowledge of how Iran’s fractious military services actually operate in practice, beyond what any manual can capture.

The Decapitation of Iran’s Military Hierarchy
How the Loss of Institutional Memory Breaks Operational Coordination
The Breakdown of Inter-Service Trust and Cooperation
Iran’s “Mosaic Defense” Strategy and the Coordination Paradox
The Signs That Operations Continue Despite the Leadership Vacuum
The Hastily Built Institutional Replacements
The Limits of Decentralization in Modern Conflict
Conclusion

The Decapitation of Iran’s Military Hierarchy

Iran’s military structure had always been designed with redundancy in mind, yet the speed and scope of these losses has overwhelmed even a system built to absorb individual casualties. Mohammad Pakpour, killed on February 28, was the Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—arguably the most powerful military figure in Iran after the Supreme Leader. His loss removed the person who coordinated strategy across the IRGC’s different branches: ground forces, aerospace forces, and the drone and missile units that have become central to Iran’s military doctrine. When Pakpour died, no single person stepped into his role with the same level of authority or understanding of ongoing operations.

The subsequent deaths compounded the problem. Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi represented different parts of Iran’s military establishment—the ministry handles procurement and policy, while the general staff coordinates operations across the regular military and the IRGC. The deaths of both figures meant that the connections between these institutions, relationships that had been built over years, had to be rebuilt from scratch. Ali Shamkhani, the Secretary of Iran’s Defence Council, represented continuity with the civilian government and the Supreme Leader’s office; his death created a gap between military command and political authority that has had to be hastily filled by restructuring.

The Decapitation of Iran's Military Hierarchy

How the Loss of Institutional Memory Breaks Operational Coordination

There is a critical difference between losing a commander and losing the ecosystem of understanding that surrounds that commander. When a senior general dies, the military does not just lose a person—it loses the network of trust, the informal channels of communication, and the institutional knowledge about which subordinates are reliable, which requests can be fast-tracked, and which bureaucratic obstacles can be navigated. A new Defense Minister can read the policy files, but he will not know, as the previous minister did, which quartermaster has a reputation for finding supplies when officially they don’t exist, or which regional commander cuts corners in ways that are actually harmless versus ways that create real operational risk. The cascading effects are visible in Iran’s supply chains.

Reports from Iran International indicate that military units are operating with acute supply shortages—some frontline forces have minimal ammunition, food, and drinking water. This is not necessarily because Iran lacks these supplies in absolute terms, but because the loss of senior logistical planners and procurement officials has disrupted the informal systems that actually get supplies to the front. When the established networks of decision-makers are gone, requests get stuck in bureaucratic bottlenecks. Newly promoted officers lack the credibility and relationships needed to cut through those bottlenecks the way their predecessors did. The system that worked under the old leadership becomes inefficient under the new leadership, not because the new leaders are incompetent, but because they lack the social capital to operate the military’s actual (rather than official) procedures.

The Breakdown of Inter-Service Trust and Cooperation

Beyond simple logistics, the death of senior commanders has fractured relationships between Iran’s regular military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an institution that has always maintained a degree of independence and rivalry with the conventional armed forces. Reports indicate that wounded army personnel have been denied assistance by the irgc in some cases—a sign that the institutional cooperation that senior commanders once enforced through their personal authority is breaking down. Without figures like Pakpour, who understood both organizations, there is no one with the stature to mediate disputes or coordinate joint operations effectively.

This inter-service friction is particularly dangerous because Iran’s military strategy increasingly depends on coordination between different branches: the IRGC’s drones and missiles need to be timed with conventional military operations, intelligence gathering needs to inform both branches, and command decisions need to prevent one service from working at cross-purposes with the other. When a senior general could pick up the phone and directly reach counterparts in the other service, these coordination problems could be resolved quickly. With that general gone, the same decision now requires going through channels, facing bureaucratic delays, and potentially being filtered through officials who lack the authority to speak for their service. The result is slower coordination and tactical decisions made in isolation rather than in concert.

The Breakdown of Inter-Service Trust and Cooperation

Iran’s “Mosaic Defense” Strategy and the Coordination Paradox

Iran’s response to the leadership losses has been to activate a long-planned “Mosaic Defense” strategy, which divides the country into 31 semi-autonomous provincial corps, each capable of independent military operations. This decentralization was intentionally designed to ensure that the loss of senior leadership would not paralyze the entire military—if the top command was destroyed, the provincial corps could continue fighting independently. In theory, this is an elegant solution: instead of one chain of command running through a few senior generals, you have 31 smaller chains of command, each self-sufficient. However, there is a significant tradeoff inherent in any decentralization strategy.

The same autonomy that allows provincial corps to function without central guidance also means they cannot coordinate effectively with each other. A strategy that was designed to survive the death of the Supreme Leader and senior generals now faces the problem that analysts describe as a risk of “chaos, with less impactful operations because units won’t achieve critical mass, and less experienced units falling victim to confusion and disorder.” Some provincial commanders may make decisions that contradict the decisions of neighboring commanders. Resources may be allocated inefficiently because there is no central authority deciding where they are most needed. Larger, more sophisticated operations that require timing and coordination across multiple regions become harder to execute.

The Signs That Operations Continue Despite the Leadership Vacuum

Despite these coordination problems, Iran has not ceased military operations. In fact, the intelligence available suggests that Iran’s long-range strike capability has remained intact. The tempo and geographic spread of attacks continue, and analysts note that “the number of drones striking Saudi Arabia is not declining—it is increasing” despite the loss of 16 senior leaders. This suggests that Iran’s operational “kill chain”—the decision-making, targeting, and execution process—has retained enough structure and cohesion to function at scale.

This apparent contradiction—massive leadership losses but continuing military operations—is explained partly by the fact that some operations, particularly drone and missile strikes, may have been planned well in advance. Targets may have been identified months ago, and the execution process may require less real-time coordination than conventional military operations. Additionally, the autonomy of the provincial corps means that commanders at that level have the authority to order strikes without waiting for approval from a new national command structure. However, the limitation is that while Iran can continue executing pre-planned operations, it may struggle with new strategic initiatives that require coordination across multiple commands or adjustments to strategy based on changing circumstances.

The Signs That Operations Continue Despite the Leadership Vacuum

The Hastily Built Institutional Replacements

Iran’s government has attempted to fill the vacuum by creating new institutional structures. The Supreme National Security Council announced the creation of a “Defense Council” under President Masoud Pezeshkian, composed of the heads of the three government branches, representatives of the Supreme Leader’s office, and senior military officials. This new council is meant to replace some of the coordination functions that were previously handled by individual senior generals who had the stature and relationships to operate across institutional boundaries.

However, a newly created council is inherently weaker than the relationships and authority it is meant to replace. The Defense Council exists on paper; the trust and understanding between its members will take time to build. In the interim, military operations will proceed with less coordination than before, decisions will be made more slowly, and some coordination problems will fall through gaps in the institutional structure because no one is entirely sure who is responsible for solving them. This is the period of greatest vulnerability—not immediately after the leadership deaths, when operations may continue on momentum, but weeks and months later, when the absence of established decision-making authority begins to compound.

The Limits of Decentralization in Modern Conflict

The Mosaic Defense strategy reveals a fundamental tension in modern military coordination. In a world of drones, missiles, and long-range precision strikes, some operations can be carried out by semi-autonomous units. But in a world where military campaigns increasingly depend on intelligence fusion (gathering information from multiple sources and processing it centrally), cyber operations that affect multiple regions, and strategic decision-making that affects resource allocation across the entire military, decentralization creates inefficiencies. A unit in one province may take actions that undermine the strategy in another province, simply because there is no central command ensuring alignment.

Looking forward, the question is whether Iran’s military can rebuild a centralized command structure faster than decentralization creates confusion and inefficiency. The Defense Council may eventually become an effective coordinating body, but that will take time. In the interim, Iran’s military will continue to function as a collection of semi-autonomous forces, capable of executing existing plans but potentially less effective at adapting to new circumstances or mounting sophisticated coordinated operations. The leadership losses have essentially forced Iran into a degraded mode of military operations—not incapable, but constrained by the loss of the senior figures who once made the military operate as a coherent whole.

Conclusion

Iran’s military is struggling to coordinate its defense not because the soldiers and field commanders are incompetent, but because the loss of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and 40 senior commanders has destroyed the institutional knowledge, personal relationships, and networks of authority that made the military function effectively as a unified force. The cascading effects—supply chain breakdowns, inter-service tensions, slower decision-making, and reduced coordination—are the inevitable result of losing people who understood not just their official roles but the actual informal systems by which the military operates.

The Mosaic Defense strategy of decentralized provincial commands was meant to prevent exactly this scenario, yet it has instead shifted Iran’s military into a degraded but resilient operating mode. The real risk is not that Iran’s military will collapse, but that it will operate less effectively for the months it takes to rebuild centralized command authority and for new leaders to establish the trust and relationships needed to make the system work again. The Defense Council and promoted commanders will eventually develop the institutional knowledge they currently lack, but in the interim, Iran’s military capability—particularly its ability to conduct sophisticated, coordinated, large-scale operations—is constrained by the simple fact that no institution can function at full capacity when it simultaneously loses its leadership and has to rebuild the relationships that hold it together.