When Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz publicly declared on March 18 that military assassinations of Iranian officials no longer required political approval, he was not updating a procedure. He was redefining the Iranian war itself.
Until that moment, targeted killings were understood as a precision instrument, aimed at specific targets, senior figures, with decisions made at the highest political level. Once that approval requirement was removed, the boundary disappeared. There is no longer a clear line separating who is on the list from who is not.
The message was never intended for the Israeli public. It was intended for the Iranian system and for every individual inside it.
To understand the weight of that statement, consider what has happened since the end of February 2026. In the opening strikes of the operation, Iran’s entire senior command layer was eliminated. Then came the clarification—anyone appointed to replace them would become a target as well. This is not a campaign against people. It is a campaign against the positions themselves, against the function, not just the man who fills it.
When you connect these moves, a logic emerges. Not a sequence of operations, but a structured process, four stages, each building on the last.
Stage one: Decapitation
The objective here is not simply to kill individuals, but to shatter continuity. Every state depends on a leadership layer that holds institutional knowledge, experience and decision-making authority. When that entire layer is removed at once, the system goes into shock.
But this alone does not bring a regime down. Systems adapt. They promote replacements, reorganize and continue functioning, often less effectively, but functioning nonetheless. What makes this campaign different is that the replacements are targeted, too. The goal is not just the man, but the office.
Stage two: Capability degradation
Decapitation alone is insufficient. A new leadership that inherits intact capabilities can still fight. So, alongside the assassinations, missile systems are destroyed, air defenses dismantled and infrastructure struck. Any replacement leadership that emerges does so with fewer tools and diminished reach. The state is weakened, but still standing.
Stage three: Behavioral change
This is where Katz’s declaration does its real work. The significance is not operational—it is psychological. Previously, only senior figures were at risk. Now every officer, every mid-level commander, every functionary in the apparatus understands that he is exposed.
This is a move designed to alter behavior from the inside. To make the people running the machine ask themselves not just how to operate, but whether to keep operating at all.
And yet, here is the central point—all three stages together do not topple a regime. They generate pressure, fear and attrition. But they do not produce collapse. Regimes do not fall because of external pressure alone. They fall when their internal mechanisms of coercion stop working for them.
Why Iran is different: Two armies
To understand why, you must look at Iran’s structure. Unlike most states, Iran does not have one military—it has two. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia are ideological forces whose institutional purpose is to defend the regime.
The Artesh, Iran’s conventional military, is built on a different foundation—national defense, professional hierarchy, and a considerably weaker ideological bond. The IRGC is built to fight for the regime until the end. The Artesh—not necessarily.
This distinction matters enormously. Domestic protests, however large, cannot bring down a regime that is willing to massacre its own people.
Armed Kurdish and Baluchi forces may tie down IRGC units on multiple fronts, but they cannot defeat the Revolutionary Guards alone. The only path to regime collapse runs through defection, and the most consequential defection would come from the Artesh.
Creating the fracture: Four lines of pressure on the IRGC
For the Artesh to move, it first needs to see the IRGC fracture. That fracture does not happen on its own. It must be built, deliberately, across several lines of pressure simultaneously.
Selective targeting within the IRGC’s ideological core—striking commanders from the hardline faction while leaving others comparatively untouched. When one part of an organization is hit repeatedly while another is spared, a new internal hierarchy of risk emerges. Commanders start asking not just how to fight, but who is marked, and why.
Selective economic pressure. The IRGC is not only a military force. It is a vast economic empire with stakes across construction, energy, banking and trade. When specific assets belonging to specific factions are destroyed while others are left intact, it creates diverging interests inside the same organization. Some have everything to lose. Others have already lost it.
Information warfare directed inward: messages that expose internal fault lines, highlight corruption, or portray senior commanders protecting themselves while sending others to die. The goal is not ideological persuasion. It is to corrode trust, the one thing that holds a coercive apparatus together.
Quiet communication channels with mid-level officers—not the senior leadership, but the commanders in the field, the people who actually exercise coercive power on the ground. That is where the first genuine fracture becomes possible, and where the first real choice gets made.
Stage four: Building the exit
The fracture inside the IRGC is not the end goal. Its purpose is to shift how the Artesh reads the situation. A conventional military watching a unified, dominant Revolutionary Guard will not move.
But a conventional military watching an organization that appears fractured, internally suspicious and visibly weakened begins to calculate differently. Not certainty, just possibility. And possibility is enough to start a process.
Which brings us to the fourth stage. No more killing. Instead, creating conditions for armed defection. Not just fear, but an exit. Not just a threat, but an alternative. An officer does not abandon a system simply because he is afraid. He abandons it when he believes there is a future on the other side. That means guaranteed immunity, protection for his family, preservation of his interests, and above all, credible American backing that makes the promise worth believing.
This logic has a historical precedent. In Romania in 1989, Ceaușescu’s regime did not fall because of street protests alone, and not because of external pressure. It fell the moment the army stopped obeying and crossed to the side of the protesters. From that moment, the collapse was fast.
It was not the killing of the leadership that brought down the regime. It was the movement of an armed force.
The distinction that matters
The assassinations and the destruction of military capabilities are not the end objective. They are preparation, conditions being laid for the fourth and decisive stage. They generate fear, open cracks and degrade coherence.
But the decisive moment will come only if an armed force, above all the Artesh, concludes that it has a real alternative and that choosing it is worth the risk.
As long as that does not happen, the regime is damaged but survives. The moment it does, it falls, and quickly.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
