The strategic doctrine that has allowed Iran to absorb months of US and Israeli bombardment was not improvised. It was shaped over nearly four decades by one man's experience in Iran's bloodiest conflict. Ali Khamenei, who led the Islamic Republic as Supreme Leader until his death in the initial airstrikes on February 28, built Iran's wartime playbook from lessons he absorbed as president during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing a Foreign Affairs analysis by Narges Bajoghli of Johns Hopkins SAIS, Khamenei was not the obvious successor to Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. His clerical credentials were modest. But his wartime political education proved more consequential than any religious rank.
The Iran-Iraq War taught Tehran's leadership a foundational insight: as long as Iran insisted on sovereignty, it would face sustained pressure from the United States that could turn into war at any moment. Bajoghli noted that Iran saw the conflict not as a bilateral war but as a proxy campaign in which the US, the Soviet Union, and much of the Arab world backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Cut off from conventional arms supplies by a US embargo, Iran had to improvise - developing tactics that did not depend on expensive hardware or international supply chains. "What began as improvisation evolved into a coherent doctrine," Bajoghli wrote. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps became the institutional home for asymmetric deterrence, building partner networks across Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria over the following decades.
By the time the current war began, each of these theaters had produced battle-tested commanders and logistics networks. The same decentralized systems built to move fighters through Iraq and Syria are now maintaining supply chains under bombardment. Khamenei's legacy, Bajoghli argued, is a military establishment designed not to win battles but to survive wars.
"Hvylya" previously covered how Washington briefly paused military strikes on Iran following talks.