Moshe Eshel

Conventional thinking mistakes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for a conventional military or grassroots insurgency. This strategic assessment reveals it for what it truly is: a hermetic ruling caste — a socio-economic hydra of roughly one million core members sustaining a patronage network of nearly ten million beneficiaries — structurally fused to the Iranian state’s very survival.
Rather than pursuing classic regime change, the ongoing campaign follows a precise logic of systemic deconstruction through industrial attrition. Permanent air superiority, methodical demolition of defense manufacturing and energy infrastructure, and the amplification of internal friction via satellite-enabled resistance networks are stripping the regime of its institutional memory, financial lifelines, and coercive capacity.
Victory will not be declared by treaty, but by an irreversible metric: the unimpeded flow of commercial shipping through a sanitized Strait of Hormuz — concrete proof that the IRGC’s regional power projection has been permanently extinguished.
Read the full analysis for the operational mechanics, geopolitical timeline, and the two viable end-states now being pursued.