The war with Israel has prompted generational turnover in Iranian military leadership. Israel killed dozens of senior Iranian military officers during the recent 12-day conflict, eliminating many of the most influential figures in the Islamic Republic. These officers included the heads of the most powerful military institutions under the supreme leader: the Armed Forces General Staff (AFGS), Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters, and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[i] These are the chief entities responsible for commanding, controlling, and coordinating the armed forces and its operations. Israel also killed many of the key deputies in these institutions as part of its efforts to decapitate Iranian military leadership.[ii]

Many of the senior officers whom Israel killed comprised one of the most enduring and influential factions in the Islamic Republic. These officers met in their youth while fighting in the trenches against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s. These officers became deeply ideological in these formative years, embracing the worldview of the founder and first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Rouhollah Khomeini. These officers forged brotherly bonds during this crucible experience and maintained those relationships through the following decades. They spent these years ascending the military ranks and coming to hold some of the seniormost posts in the military establishment. They became central architects of Iranian strategy and security policy and trusted military advisers of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. They led the Iranian adoption of an offensive strategy that emphasized aggressively working to expand regime influence and strategic depth across the Middle East.[iii] They also led regime efforts to build an increasingly authoritarian police and surveillance state.[iv] The Critical Threats Project identified this faction in 2013, labeling it the IRGC Command Network.[v]

The IRGC Command Network exerted significant political influence in addition to its military control by the time of the war with Israel. Its members regularly intervened in domestic affairs to assert their political preferences. Many of Command Network members wrote an infamous open letter to then-President and prominent reformist Mohammad Khatami in 1999, for example, pressing him to violently suppress ongoing student protests.[vi] They threatened to intervene, presumably by deploying the military forces at their disposal, if Khatami declined to act. Command Network members had more recently broadcasted their support for certain hardline politicians. They rallied, for instance, behind one of their own—Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—when he became parliament speaker in May 2020.[vii] They also openly flaunted their support for Ebrahim Raisi, who pursued a hardline agenda as president and was a leading contender to succeed Khamenei as supreme leader.[viii]

The sudden loss of so many IRGC Command Network members has dislodged this faction from power and created vacuums in the military hierarchy, political landscape, and Khamenei’s inner circle. The Islamic Republic will fill this void in time, of course. But doing so will necessarily elevate a new cadre of military leaders who will have their own opportunities to shape Iranian behavior. The leaders who emerge in the coming weeks and months will bring their own ideas and theories into Iranian strategic thinking. They could very well share the aggressive tendencies and hardline positions that many of the Command Network members had. But it is far from clear that such a cohesive bloc will again dominate the Iranian military and political spheres any time soon. 

Relatively moderate political elements have tried to exploit the vacuum created since Israel destroyed the IRGC Command Network. Some of these moderates have tried in recent weeks to rally political allies and reassert themselves in the political establishment.[ix] These moderates have a unique opportunity in this regard, as many of the now-deceased Command Network members had long opposed and tried to discredit them. It is too soon to say whether the moderates will meaningful reenter Iranian decision-making circles, however.

Greater moderate influence in Iran would likely lead to more measured domestic and foreign policies but still carries great risks for the United States. Many of the relative moderates maintain their overt hostility to the United States and seek to collaborate further with China, Russia, and North Korea to upend the US-led global order. The destruction of the IRGC Command Network is certainly a victory for the United States and its allies, as its members were directly responsible for the deaths of many Americans and Iranians alike. But there is no guarantee that the individuals who succeed the Command Network will be less dangerous to Washington and its interests.