Iran's current military strategy is to survive intense Israeli-U.S. pressure, rebuild its core capabilities, and restore deterrence by calibrated asymmetric escalation through missiles, drones and proxies. This is not a strategy of victory. It is a strategy of endurance.
The distinction matters. When the U.S. and Israel launched joint airstrikes against military and government sites in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah in late February 2026, killing Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, they gambled that decapitation strikes would cripple Iran's ability to respond. The evidence since suggests otherwise. Across four major episodes of direct conflict from April 2024 up to this week, Iran has launched thousands of projectiles including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones in almost two dozen waves targeting Israel and Arab countries in the gulf.
What is Iran actually trying to accomplish? The objective is not to maximise strike volume, but to sustain a resilient and enduring campaign of attrition. Iran's military strategy firstly focuses on asymmetric endurance, which involves hardening missile cities, dispersing command structures, and accepting initial damage in order to preserve a second-strike capability. When Iran's foreign minister claimed that military units have now turned independent and isolated, acting on general instructions given to them in advance, he was describing something close to institutionalised survival through decentralisation.
Consider what Iran is trying to achieve regionally. The breadth of Iran's targets in Gulf Arab states, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Cyprus is unprecedented. Strikes on U.S. bases and embassies in the Gulf likely reflect Tehran's sense that with its back against the wall, its best option is to raise the cost as quickly as possible for Washington's allies. This is not random violence. It is a calculated attempt to convince the United States and its regional partners that the cost of continuing the war exceeds any plausible benefit.
Iran has a lot more short-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching the gulf, and thousands of quickly manufacturable suicide drones. As the Iranians run out of long-range stuff, the centre of gravity of this conflict is increasingly shifting to the GCC and oil infrastructure. This shift is not accidental. Iran has effectively closed the strategic Strait of Hormuz, which facilitates passage of one-fifth of global oil trade. Shipping companies have been steering clear of the area, leading to oil shipment disruptions that could provoke significant price hikes.
Yet there is a genuine counterargument worth serious consideration. Iran's strategy of trying to threaten energy security, drive a wedge between Gulf and Western states and raise costs is backfiring, driving and pushing the Gulf states into closer alignment with the United States. The Gulf states can't simply sit idle and continue absorbing indefinite attacks to their critical infrastructure and to civilians in Gulf cities. One senior gulf official described Iran's strikes on its neighbours as a miscalculation and told CNN that Tehran had lost all goodwill from Islamic and Arab states.
There is also the question of Iran's own sustainability. Iran can likely sustain intermittent missile, drone, proxy, and cyber operations for years because these systems are relatively cheap and can be produced from dispersed, hardened facilities even under sanctions. However, prolonged high-intensity conflict that invites repeated large U.S.-Israeli strikes risks severe economic contraction, internal unrest, and further erosion of regime legitimacy. Tehran has strong incentives to oscillate between escalation and tacit pauses rather than sustain continuous full-scale war.
Strip away the propaganda from both sides and what remains is this: Iran is pursuing what horizontal escalation means, when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre, and it is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation; when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict.
The real risk now is that neither side maintains control of their own strategy. Numerous actors have now entered the conflict, each pursuing distinct interests, none fully coordinated, and all capable of altering the trajectory of escalation beyond Washington's control. The longer multiple states feel pressure, the more that politics both within and among regional states can intensify the conflict. Without a version of NATO in the Middle East or a single American general effectively running the military operation for all the countries targeted by Iran, there is a high risk of wires getting crossed.
History offers some sober lessons. In Vietnam and Serbia, U.S. adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat in the former case and frustrating U.S. war aims in the latter. Iran will not achieve military victory. Washington and Tel Aviv possess overwhelming conventional superiority. But a conflict prosecuted through attrition, cost-imposition and regional spillover can be won in other ways—or more accurately, both sides can find themselves losing in ways neither originally intended.