Four weeks into Operation Epic Fury, with airstrikes having killed a sitting supreme leader, wiped out scores of top military and intelligence commanders, and significantly degraded Iran’s missile arsenal and naval capacity, Washington is confronting a conclusion that was reached by its own intelligence community before the first bomb fell: the Islamic Republic is not going anywhere.
A National Intelligence Council assessment completed in February concluded that neither limited airstrikes nor a larger, prolonged military campaign would be likely to result in a new government taking over in Iran, even if the current leadership were killed. The briefings delivered to President Trump were described by one source familiar with the findings as “sobering.”
A multitude of intelligence reports now provide consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger of collapsing and retains control of the Iranian public. The war’s costs are nonetheless mounting.
More than $16 billion has been spent so far, 13 U.S. troops have been killed, and Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz has slowed shipping traffic to a trickle, creating a historic oil disruption that has sent global energy markets into turmoil. Daily oil exports from the Middle East have fallen by at least 60 percent since the war began, the IEA has said, calling it the largest supply disruption in the global oil market’s history.
A U.S. intelligence official, speaking to The Cipher Brief on background, captured the core dilemma plainly, “You can’t get regime change from the air, and who is to replace them when there is no viable alternative.”
The son rises — harder than the father
Nine days into the war, Iran's Assembly of Experts met and named a new supreme leader. They chose Mojtaba Khamenei 56, second son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and in doing so gave Washington an answer it had not been looking for. Inside Iran, critics felt the sting of a republic born from the ashes of dynastic rule that had just handed the top job from father to son. President Trump called the selection “a big mistake” and said Mojtaba was flatly “unacceptable” to him.
The new supreme leader is widely assessed as even more hardline than his father, though the full contours of his leadership remain difficult to read, in part because he has not appeared in public since the war began, knowing that he is being actively targeted.
For decades, he operated in the shadows of his father’s office. U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in the late 2000s referred to him as “the power behind the robes” and his father’s “principal gatekeeper.”
At the same time, a 2008 cable reportedly assessed him as “a capable and forceful leader and manager” though it also noted his lack of theological qualifications and relative youth. His path to power ran not through religious scholarship; he holds no senior clerical rank and has published no works of Islamic jurisprudence, but through the IRGC, with which he forged ties during the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s and cultivated ever since.
Intelligence experts stress that Mojtaba essentially owes the IRGC for his ascendance, and in that vein, he isn’t going to have the same broad leverage as his father. The succession process itself underscored that dynamic. The IRGC argued that the war required a swift process and that selecting a candidate who defied the United States, contacted Assembly of Experts members, and prompted objections, yet, in the end, they felt compelled to support him. IRGC leaders, Basij commanders, and top security officials had unparalleled access to the assembly, many of whose members rely on the Revolutionary Guards for personal protection.
The first statement attributed to Mojtaba since his appointment came on March 12, read aloud by a state television anchor over a still photograph — the new supreme leader himself nowhere to be seen. The tone left little room for interpretation.
“The lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be used,” he declared, not as a negotiating position, but as a statement of intent. The waterway that moves a fifth of the world’s oil had become, in his telling, a weapon.
Some private sector analysts noted that while his rhetoric toward the United States and Israel was uncompromising, he did not fully close the door to political outcomes, placing responsibility for ending the war squarely on Washington. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was less equivocal.
On March 17, he posted on X that the Strait of Hormuz “won’t return to its pre-war status.” Two days later, Expediency Council member Mohammad Mohaber went further still, calling for a “new regime” for the strait that would allow Iran to sanction the West by denying passage to its ships. Taken together, the message to Washington was hard to misread: across the Islamic Republic’s power structure, this war has produced no moderates.
IRGCistan: the state that emerges
What American airpower has effectively accelerated is not the dismantling of the Islamic Republic but the consolidation of its most dangerous institutional element. The IRGC is taking an even greater role in the domestic affairs of the state, ensuring the structure of the regime stays in place, while Iran’s opposition remains fractured without a credible leader capable of challenging hardline officials.
A telling example of who holds actual power came one week into the war, when President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized for Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, saying he “personally apologizes to neighboring countries that were affected by Iran’s actions.” The IRGC and hardliners pushed back immediately, a hardline parliamentarian called the statement “weak, unprofessional, and unacceptable,” forcing Pezeshkian into a climbdown that notably omitted his original apology from the official readout. This has been widely interpreted as the IRGC now being in full charge of the embattled nation, and calling the shots as to who, how and when to attack.
Despite sitting on the interim leadership council formed to administer the country while a new supreme leader was selected, Pezeshkian appears to have been reduced to a figurehead. The elected civilian layer of the Iranian state has been hollowed out in real time.
That hollowing-out has only deepened since. On March 17, Ali Larijani — the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and one of the most prominent non-clerical figures in Iranian politics — was killed in an Israeli airstrike, removing the highest-level official to be assassinated since Khamenei himself. U.S. and Israeli intelligence had assessed Larijani as Iran’s de facto leader in the weeks after the war’s opening strikes, given widespread doubts about Mojtaba’s capacity to govern. Iran has since named Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a hardline former IRGC deputy commander, to replace him; a move that further consolidates the Guards’ grip over the regime’s security architecture.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Each leadership vacancy created by the war’s decapitation strikes has been filled not by civilian or clerical figures but by men with deep IRGC roots. As one U.S. intelligence official speaking on background to The Cipher Brief told us, the internal dynamics are shaped less by strategy than by the weight of an accepted narrative — and that narrative, for now, belongs to the guards.
Royce de Melo, a security and defense consultant and analyst specializing in the Middle East and Africa, tells The Cipher Brief that he sees the current trajectory as a natural, if not inevitable, evolution.
“As fanatical loyalists, the IRGC have always been the power behind the regime since the 1979 Iranian Revolution; they are Iran’s Praetorian Guard,” he explains. “For the IRGC to take control of the government temporarily, be it until this war ends, or with a longer-term intent, in my opinion, would be a natural course.”
A senior Arab official told Axios that the IRGC is taking over Iran and that its members are “highly ideological and are ready to die.” Whether this constitutes a full “IRGCistan” remains debated. De Melo, however, cautions against treating the framing as settled.
“It’s early days, and no one seems certain as to what is happening with the government at the moment,” he continues. “Nonetheless, even if Iran’s government becomes military-dominated under the IRGC, that is not to say it still won’t remain theocratic. It can be both military-dominated and theocratic.”
The senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Behnam Ben Taleblu, has closely tracked this dynamic. The regime, he argues, is not deluded about its own condition — it knows the damage is real. What it is counting on is that a wounded adversary can still make the price of finishing the job too high. The IRGC’s track record of reconstituting after setbacks is a significant part of why that bet is not entirely unreasonable.
The IRGC has buried commanders before and found new ones. Its missile production was designed from the ground up to keep running under pressure, drawing on domestic supply rather than imports that could be choked off. Strikes can hollow out a building. They are less effective against an institution that knows how to reconstitute — and Western policymakers are finding that out as the war continues.
There is also no one waiting to take over. The Iranian opposition is split along ethnic, ideological, and geographic lines, with no figure capable of commanding broad national support and no organization with the reach to matter. Azizi, a postdoctoral associate and lecturer at Yale, puts the IRGC's position plainly: not a single chain of command, but circles and networks that have spent decades threading themselves through Iran's economy and military alike. You do not dislodge that with bombs.
A harder adversary than the one Washington set out to degrade
The administration’s stated objectives — the missiles, the navy, the nuclear program — may yet be achieved. Inside the intelligence community, however, the more unsettling question has never really been about the targets. It has been about what comes after. The consistent answer across multiple outside assessments is not reassuring: the Iran that emerges from this war is shaping up to be harder to manage than the one Washington decided to strike.
Jonathan Panikoff, who served as former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the National Intelligence Council before becoming director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, described the best-case scenario for a post-war Iran as one in which there is meaningful competition for power — but added that he was skeptical such an outcome would arise. “Somebody with guns fundamentally has to switch sides or stand aside,” he said. That has not happened.
The nuclear dimension adds a further layer of complexity. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has been unambiguous on the point: military action has badly damaged Iran’s nuclear program, but it cannot erase the knowledge, materials, and industrial capacity that would allow Tehran to rebuild.
“You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned,” Grossi said, adding that Iran retains the capabilities and the industrial base to reconstitute.
De Melo also flags what he sees as the variable most likely to shape Iran’s rebuilding speed: Beijing and Moscow. Chinese companies have kept the pipeline of dual-use technology moving — missile fuel components, electronics, drone engines — throughout the conflict.
Russia, meanwhile, has spent years on the receiving end of Iranian military hardware, taking in billions of dollars’ worth of equipment and drone technology since 2021. The reversal De Melo describes is straightforward: Russia can
now send Iranian-design drones, manufactured on Russian soil, back the other way.
A Pentagon source, speaking to The Cipher Brief on background, offered a sobering structural observation about how intelligence informs — or fails to inform — decision-making at the top.
“In my experience, what happens is you submit a brief that is then accepted, edited or rejected on the basis of the accepted narrative,” the source cautions. “It is narrative, whatever that might be, which is controlling.”
It is a dynamic that troubles those who have spent careers watching Washington repeat the cycle.
Del Wilber, a retired CIA case officer, warns that the administration risks mistaking tactical gains for strategic resolution. Declaring victory short of complete regime change, he argues, would be a fundamental error.
“Iran will only redouble its efforts to reconstitute their weapons development programs quietly, and stir up mischief in the region,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “Nothing will stop the existing regime from pursuing its goal of the destruction of Israel and hurting the United States.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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