The short answer is yes — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was designed from the ground up to survive exactly the kind of decapitation strike the United States and Israel carried out on February 28, 2026. Operation Epic Fury killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and hit over 1,000 targets, but the IRGC’s response was immediate and revealing: it split into 31 independent provincial regiments, each with full tactical autonomy, activating a long-planned guerrilla doctrine known as “Mosaic Defense.” This is not a force that collapses when you cut the head off. It is a force that was built to fight without one. The scale of what remains is staggering.
Between 150,000 and 190,000 active IRGC personnel — potentially 600,000 with reserves — plus a Basij paramilitary militia that Iran claims can mobilize up to one million volunteers, are now operating under decentralized command across a country of rugged mountains and vast deserts. Underground “Missile Cities” exist in every province, stocked with the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. Analysts at Responsible Statecraft warn that dismantling the IRGC risks splintering it into violent, heavily armed factions that could disperse across the region and wage insurgent warfare for years. This article examines the guerrilla infrastructure Iran has built, the proxy networks that remain partially intact, the underground weapons caches that no airstrike campaign can fully neutralize, and what all of it means for U.S. policy going forward.
Table of Contents
- How Was the IRGC Built to Sustain Guerrilla Warfare After the Regime Falls?
- What Underground Weapons Infrastructure Survives the Airstrikes?
- The Proxy Network — Damaged but Not Dead
- Asymmetric Threats to the Strait of Hormuz and Global Energy Markets
- The Splintering Risk — When a Military Becomes Multiple Militias
- The IRGC’s Rebranding Strategy and Domestic Legitimacy Play
- What Comes Next — The Long War Scenario
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
How Was the IRGC Built to Sustain Guerrilla Warfare After the Regime Falls?
The IRGC was never a conventional military in the Western sense. It was forged during the 1979 revolution and the brutal eight-year war with Iraq as an ideological fighting force comfortable operating in asymmetric, decentralized conditions. Unlike Iran’s regular army (the Artesh), which fields tanks, aircraft, and traditional formations, the IRGC was structured to function in exactly the chaos that follows a regime collapse. Its Mosaic Defense doctrine — now activated — pre-assigns local commanders authority to wage independent guerrilla campaigns in their provinces without waiting for orders from Tehran. The comparison to Iraq’s military in 2003 is instructive: Saddam Hussein’s army dissolved when Baghdad fell because it was a top-down institution. The IRGC is the opposite — it was engineered to keep fighting precisely when central command is destroyed. Iran’s geography reinforces this design.
The country is roughly four times the size of Iraq, with the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges providing natural fortifications that have frustrated invaders for centuries. The IRGC has spent decades preparing defense-in-depth positions throughout this terrain, caching weapons, pre-positioning supplies, and training units to operate autonomously for extended periods. Intelligence reporting from early 2026 indicates the IRGC even has contingency plans to rebrand itself as the only force capable of preventing “Syria-style chaos” — a calculated narrative designed to win domestic support and discourage outside intervention in a post-regime power vacuum. The Basij militia adds another layer. With roughly 90,000 active members and a claimed wartime mobilization capacity of 500,000 to one million volunteers, the Basij functions as the IRGC’s grassroots insurgency reserve. These are not professional soldiers in many cases, but they are distributed across every city, town, and village in Iran, embedded in local communities, and trained in basic military operations. In any post-regime insurgency scenario, the Basij would provide the human infrastructure an IRGC guerrilla campaign needs to sustain itself.
What Underground Weapons Infrastructure Survives the Airstrikes?
operation Epic Fury was massive in scope, but one of the hardest realities of Iran’s military posture is that much of its most dangerous capability sits underground and is extremely difficult to destroy. Iran holds the largest ballistic missile stockpile in the Middle East, with weapons ranging from 1,300 to 2,500 kilometers. These are not stored in a few centralized depots. They are dispersed across underground “Missile Cities” in every province — hardened tunnel complexes built deep into mountains. IRGC Aerospace commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh once boasted that “if we have an unveiling of missile cities every week, it won’t be finished for another two years.” That was not empty rhetoric. The dispersal strategy was specifically designed to ensure that no single strike wave could neutralize Iran’s launch capability. However, this underground infrastructure creates a different and arguably more dangerous problem in a post-regime scenario. If the clerical government collapses and IRGC command fragments, thousands of precision-guided missiles, smart mines, anti-ship weapons, and drones positioned along the Strait of Hormuz could fall under the control of individual local commanders with no central authority restraining them.
The risk is not merely that these weapons get used in a continued insurgency — it is that they could be sold to non-state actors, smuggled across borders, or wielded by competing IRGC factions jockeying for power. The precedent from Libya after Gaddafi’s fall, where weapons from government stockpiles flooded across North Africa and the Sahel, is the nightmare scenario analysts are pointing to. The limitation of airstrikes against this kind of infrastructure is well documented. You can destroy surface-level launchers, radar installations, and command buildings, as Operation Epic Fury did. But tunnel complexes buried hundreds of feet into mountainsides require either ground forces or sustained bunker-buster campaigns over weeks or months — and even then, you are working from incomplete intelligence about their locations. The U.S. lost three service members and had five seriously wounded in the February 28 strikes alone. A prolonged campaign to root out underground facilities would multiply those costs dramatically.
The Proxy Network — Damaged but Not Dead
Iran’s regional proxy strategy took serious hits before Operation Epic Fury even began. Hezbollah lost key commanders and significant infrastructure during 2024-2025 Israeli operations. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria in 2025 collapsed the Syrian militia networks that Tehran had spent billions cultivating. The “Axis of Resistance” that Iran spent decades building is, by any measure, substantially degraded. But “degraded” is not “destroyed,” and one critical node remains operational: the Houthis in Yemen retain long-range strike capability, including Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles and drones that have already demonstrated the ability to reach targets across the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Quds Force — the IRGC’s elite external operations arm — is estimated at 2,000 to 5,000 operatives whose entire purpose is managing proxy networks and conducting operations outside Iran’s borders. These are not conventional soldiers sitting in barracks waiting for orders.
They are intelligence operatives embedded across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond, with deep local relationships, safe houses, and access to funding networks. Even if every Quds Force member inside Iran were killed or captured tomorrow, the external networks they have built have a degree of self-sustaining momentum. The concern is that a post-regime IRGC, freed from the constraints of maintaining a nation-state’s diplomatic relationships, could operate its proxy networks more recklessly, not less. A specific example illustrates the point. After the U.S. killed Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, analysts predicted the Quds Force would be significantly diminished. Instead, his successor Esmail Qaani continued operations with minimal disruption. The networks are designed to survive the loss of individual leaders — the same principle that applies to the IRGC’s internal Mosaic Defense doctrine applies to its external proxy architecture.
Asymmetric Threats to the Strait of Hormuz and Global Energy Markets
The immediate practical concern for American policymakers, military planners, and ordinary consumers is what happens to the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily. Iran has spent decades preparing specifically for this scenario. Anti-ship missiles, naval mines, drones, and fast-attack craft are positioned along the strait’s narrow passages, and the IRGC Navy (separate from Iran’s regular navy) has trained extensively in swarming tactics designed to overwhelm conventional naval defenses. The tradeoff the U.S. now faces is stark. Keeping carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf to maintain freedom of navigation exposes those assets to exactly the kind of asymmetric attacks Iran has optimized for. One-way attack drones can be launched in repeated waves over hours, designed not necessarily to sink ships but to exhaust missile defense inventories and force costly defensive expenditures.
Conversely, pulling back from the strait hands a fragmented IRGC — or whatever factions control those coastal weapons caches — effective leverage over global energy prices. Neither option is costless. The IRGC’s 2025 fiscal budget exceeded 311 trillion tomans, roughly $6 billion, and was approximately 1.8 times the regular army’s funding. Iran proposed a 200 percent military budget increase that year, allocating over half of oil and gas revenues — around €12 billion — to its armed forces. Much of that spending went into exactly the asymmetric capabilities now threatening the strait. The question is not whether Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz permanently — it probably cannot against sustained U.S. naval power. The question is whether decentralized IRGC units can make transit dangerous and expensive enough to spike global oil prices and inflict economic pain that outlasts American political patience.
The Splintering Risk — When a Military Becomes Multiple Militias
The most dangerous phase of any regime collapse is not the initial military campaign — it is the period immediately after, when armed factions compete for power in the vacuum. Analysts at Responsible Statecraft have specifically warned that dismantling the IRGC risks splintering it into multiple violent, heavily armed groups that could disperse across the Middle East and launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies. This is not hypothetical. It is what happened in Iraq after de-Baathification, when former military officers and intelligence operatives became the backbone of the insurgency and eventually formed the core leadership of ISIS. The IRGC is far more ideologically cohesive than Saddam’s military was, but it is not monolithic. It contains hardline religious factions, pragmatic nationalists, corrupt business networks (the IRGC controls significant portions of Iran’s economy), and tribal or ethnic affiliations. Under a unified command structure, these internal tensions are managed. Without one, they become fault lines.
Some factions might negotiate with a new government or occupying force. Others might retreat into the mountains and wage guerrilla warfare for years. Still others might cross into Iraq, where Shia militia networks provide a ready-made support base. As Asia Times argued in March 2026, Iran’s regime “was built for survival” — and even its death may produce offspring that are harder to kill than the parent. The warning for U.S. policymakers is that military victory — even an overwhelming one — does not automatically produce political stability. The Atlantic Council’s expert reaction to Operation Epic Fury specifically flagged the unpredictable “what’s next” scenarios that follow massive strikes. Without a credible plan for the day after, the U.S. risks trading a contained adversary for a dispersed, ungovernable threat.
The IRGC’s Rebranding Strategy and Domestic Legitimacy Play
One underappreciated element of IRGC contingency planning is the organization’s awareness that it needs a narrative, not just guns. Intelligence reporting from early 2026 indicates the IRGC prepared messaging campaigns to position itself as the only institution capable of preventing the kind of societal collapse that followed Assad’s fall in Syria. The pitch to ordinary Iranians would be straightforward: whatever you think of the clerical regime, do you want your country to become the next Libya, the next Iraq, the next Syria? We are the only force that can prevent that.
This is a deliberate strategy, and it has historical precedent. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, former KGB and security apparatus figures in Russia used exactly this argument to maintain influence and eventually consolidate power. The IRGC is betting that even Iranians who despise the regime may prefer a devil they know to the chaos of total state failure. If that narrative gains traction domestically, an IRGC-led insurgency would have access to local support, shelter, and recruits — the essential ingredients that allow guerrilla campaigns to sustain themselves for years or decades.
What Comes Next — The Long War Scenario
The most honest assessment of the current situation is that Operation Epic Fury achieved significant tactical results — destroying critical military infrastructure and eliminating Iran’s supreme leader — but may have opened a strategic problem that will take years to resolve. A country of 88 million people, four times the size of Iraq, with a professional guerrilla force designed for exactly this contingency, extensive underground weapons infrastructure, and residual proxy networks across the region does not simply pacify because its government buildings are in rubble. The pattern from Iraq and Afghanistan is instructive, if grim. In both cases, the initial military campaign was rapid and decisive.
The insurgency that followed was not. U.S. forces spent eight years in Iraq and twenty in Afghanistan fighting enemies that were less well-armed, less well-organized, and operating in smaller countries than Iran. The IRGC has studied those conflicts carefully, and its Mosaic Defense doctrine is explicitly designed to replicate the insurgent playbook that ultimately exhausted American willpower in both theaters. Whether the Trump administration has a plan for this phase — or whether it believed the strikes alone would be sufficient — is the question that will define the next decade of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Conclusion
Iran’s guerrilla warfare capability is not a theoretical concern — it is an active, designed, and now-activated system. The IRGC’s Mosaic Defense doctrine, its underground missile cities, its Basij mobilization network, and its residual proxy forces across the region represent exactly the kind of dispersed, asymmetric threat that conventional military power struggles to defeat. Operation Epic Fury demonstrated that the U.S. and Israel can destroy Iran’s surface-level military infrastructure and kill its leadership. What it did not demonstrate is a strategy for what comes after.
The stakes extend well beyond Iran’s borders. An IRGC insurgency could destabilize Iraq, threaten the Strait of Hormuz for years, put U.S. forces and allies at risk of terrorist attacks from splintered factions, and create a weapons proliferation crisis as underground stockpiles fall into the hands of local commanders or non-state actors. Policymakers, military planners, and the American public should be clear-eyed about what has been started. The airstrikes may have been the easy part. The hard part — preventing a fractured, heavily armed guerrilla force from waging a long war across the Middle East — is just beginning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many IRGC fighters could participate in a guerrilla insurgency?
The IRGC has 150,000 to 190,000 active personnel, with reserves potentially bringing the total to 600,000. Adding the Basij paramilitary militia — 90,000 active with a claimed wartime mobilization of 500,000 to one million — the total potential insurgent force is enormous by any historical standard.
What is the IRGC’s Mosaic Defense doctrine?
Mosaic Defense is a pre-planned strategy that splits the IRGC into independent provincial regiments, each with full tactical autonomy. It was activated after Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, creating 31 independent units designed to wage guerrilla warfare without centralized command and control.
Can airstrikes destroy Iran’s underground missile stockpiles?
Not easily. Iran has built underground “Missile Cities” in every province, buried deep in mountainous terrain. IRGC commanders have stated that showcasing all these facilities would take over two years. The dispersed nature of these sites makes it extremely difficult to eliminate Iran’s weapons capability through airstrikes alone.
Are Iran’s proxy forces still operational after the 2025 setbacks?
Partially. Hezbollah and Syrian militias suffered major losses, but the Houthis in Yemen retain long-range ballistic missile and drone capability. The Quds Force’s 2,000 to 5,000 operatives maintain external networks that have some degree of self-sustaining capacity independent of Tehran’s central command.
What is the risk of IRGC weapons falling into the wrong hands?
Significant. Thousands of precision-guided missiles, smart mines, and drones along the Strait of Hormuz could fall under local commander control if central authority collapses. Analysts warn these weapons could be sold to non-state actors, similar to the weapons proliferation that followed Libya’s collapse after Gaddafi.
How does Iran’s situation compare to Iraq after 2003?
Iran presents a potentially more difficult insurgency scenario. It is roughly four times the size of Iraq, has more mountainous terrain, and the IRGC is more ideologically cohesive and better organized than Saddam Hussein’s military was. The IRGC also explicitly studied the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies to design its own guerrilla doctrine.