Iran does not have one army - it has two. And the tension between them may ultimately determine what kind of country emerges from the US-Israeli strikes. George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures, pointed to this overlooked fault line as potentially the most consequential factor in Iran's future.
Friedman discussed the military divide on the Talking Geopolitics podcast, as reported by "Hvylya".
The IRGC - the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - is the ideological army, linked to Islamist militias and terrorist organizations across the region. It gets "all the good weapons," Friedman noted. But alongside it exists a different force entirely: the regular Iranian army, inherited from the Shah's era. "It is a secular army. It is not an Islamist army," Friedman said. And it is larger than the IRGC.
The two forces have never been comfortable with each other. Khamenei distrusted the regular army, and the feeling was mutual. "This army has never been easy with Khamenei and this government," Friedman said. "Khamenei has never been comfortable with them." The result is a deep structural division running through Iran's military apparatus.
Friedman suggested the Trump administration may be deliberately exploiting this split. By killing Khamenei, the IRGC commander, and much of the senior leadership, Washington knocked out the political structure that kept the regular army subordinate. "I suspect that one of the things that the Trump administration is trying to do is let that tension come to a head at the point where the Iranians are the weakest," he said.
The regular army, he noted, is now "sort of cut free" - following orders as a professional force, but no longer bound to the regime that constrained it. Combined with recent mass protests that cost tens of thousands of lives, the conditions for a power shift are in place. "There is a force that can take over," Friedman said. Whether it will is another matter entirely.
Previously we wrote: From Pager Bombs to Khamenei: How October 7 Broke Israel's Taboo on Killing Foreign Leaders