The strategy of a hands-off ‘regime change from the sky’ has given way to something more familiar to contemporary audiences: war by proxy. The idea is to draw attention and manpower from the IRGC – already decimated and stretched thin by the US-Israeli air campaign – and create space for an armed coalition to emerge in opposition to the Islamic regime.
Like early hopes of people power standing in for boots on the ground, war by proxy is a beguiling idea: it’s hands off, reversible, and skirts the political and financial costs of a full invasion. But recent history illustrates some of the risks and destabilizing externalities that can be unleashed when fanning the flames of civil conflict.
As a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, the natural condition of the Iranian state is entropy – a force blunted over the years by the historical legacy of the Persian Empire and, later, revolutionary Islamic theology. The two proxies that are reportedly being armed – the Kurds and Baluchis – have their own, sectarian long-term interests, and these interests don’t necessarily align with the perpetuation of the modern Iranian state. Southern Iran, for example, is home to a long-running insurgency seeking to unite Baluchis on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border in a newly established homeland. Similar ambitions exist among Kurdish populations, split as they are between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Recent experience in Libya and Syria demonstrates what can happen when plural states collapse into their constituent parts. Libya is unlikely to revert back to its pre-war borders. Syria’s post-war efforts to integrate paramilitaries into a new state apparatus (including a past US proxy in the SDF) are encouraging, but only time will tell on their success.
Lesson 2: Beware Parallel Military Structures
Iran has two military structures of consequence in a hypothetical civil conflict: the conventional armed forces (known as the Artesh), which are tasked with protecting Iran’s external borders, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a paramilitary organization broadly tasked with protecting the Islamic revolution. Both have different force structures and the IRGC is exceptionally large for a paramilitary outfit with an estimated 150,000 troops, along with its own naval and rocket forces. To this the Basij ‘resistance force’ can be added, a volunteer paramilitary outfit that’s organized on the district level and boasts a membership anywhere from 450,000 to one million. The Basij plays a supplementary role to the IRGC and has been used for intimidation and protest suppression in the past.
The takeaway is that there are multiple paramilitary structures in play in Iran. All of them are armed, and all of them involve interpersonal power and decision-making networks that are punching above their normal weight as top-down command and control breaks down. Consequently, any process of elite fracture, whereby moderate members of the military hypothetically break from their superiors and fall in with the protestors, would have to be duplicated across multiple organizational structures to gain critical mass. This would be a best-case scenario for US-Israel planners; however, the higher number of moving parts reduces the likelihood. A more plausible outcome would be military structures fracturing and giving rise to separate fiefdoms within the current borders of the Iranian state, much like how SDF-controlled areas were administered and policed separately from Damascus over much of the Syrian civil war. The IRGC is already firmly entrenched in the economic systems of the Iranian state. In extremis, the country could come to resemble Sudan, which has been cleaved into two separate entities ruled by the conventional armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary outfit roughly analogous to the IRGC.
Lesson 3: Beware a Vacuum
Nature and geopolitics abhor a vacuum, and breakdowns in state power often generate cascading risks that cannot be predicted or planned for. The Syria civil war created the conditions for Islamic State to become entrenched in 2014; for Iraq, a neighboring civil conflict suddenly transformed into an existential crisis. There is no shortage of evidence in contemporary geopolitics, from northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo to the Sahel, indicating how vacuums are swiftly filled by transnational criminal, terrorist, or militant networks. And blowback from these networks can be felt across domains as diverse as fraud and identity theft to human trafficking and drug production.
Lesson 4: Find the Right Proxy
A newly armed and organized proxy force does not disappear from the field once its role is fulfilled in the eyes of an external patron. It persists, frequently influencing future geopolitics in unpredictable ways. A classic example of this is the Afghan mujahideen, where a once useful anti-Soviet proxy eventually cascades into the decades-long War on Terror. Extremist Baluchi groups in southern Iran would represent an analogous short-term-for-long-term trade-off, where US officials may be inclined to look beyond long-term risks. The issue of trust is another consideration, especially given that the post-war outlook may be fraught with risk for the proxy, with ongoing US support not assured. One recent example will be weighing on the decision-making of Iraq- and Iran-based Kurdish militias: US support and subsequent abandonment of the predominantly Kurdish SDF during the Syria civil war. President Trump has reportedly adopted a hardline approach in the US outreach to Kurdish groups, extending a ‘you’re either with us or against us’ ultimatum. These militias will be making their own, clear-eyed decisions based on their own interests, and these interests are much more likely to be framed by seizing and securing their own ethnic enclaves. This could entail a de facto if not de jure expansion of Iraqi Kurdistan’s writ; however, Iraq- and Iran-based Kurdish groups are not a coherent unit and have been prone to infighting in the past.
Lesson 5: Air Power Isn’t Everything
Battlefields from northern Ethiopia to Nagorno-Karabakh show how air power can make or break a ground offensive. But the Houthis of Yemen illustrate the limits of what can be achieved in an air war against an organized and ideologically committed opponent (time will tell whether Iran qualifies). Saudi Arabia launched a four-year air campaign against the Houthis in 2015, subsequently spending hundreds of billions on military operations and economic assistance to prop up the Presidential Leadership Council. Yet despite this effort, the Houthis remained dangerous enough to threaten Red Sea shipping through to 2025, eventually drawing the United States into the conflict in the costly Operation Rough Rider. Rough Rider demonstrated how a battered, finance-starved paramilitary group was nonetheless able to shoot down million-dollar Predator drones and menace maritime shipping despite Washington’s overwhelming air and naval superiority. This echoes the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the more recent rise of asymmetric swarm tactics, which can be considered a new tactical gamechanger. Iranian proxies – whether paramilitary splinter groups, ethnic militias, or armed forces – would retain the capacity to threaten energy supply chains traversing the Persian Gulf in the event of a protracted civil war or semi-permanent state fracture. The country’s vast coastline and the short distances involved allow for hit-and-run, low-cost drone strikes against largely undefended tankers, similar to what we are already seeing. The idea that the US military could physically escort vessels is impractical: there’s too much territory to cover; it would entail new and ongoing risks for the US Navy; and it would involve open-ended ordinance costs (fiscal and stockpile depletion) from having to shoot down cheap incoming drones for global shipping concerns.
