As an Iranian who has spent years studying “Islamic terrorism” in the Middle East and repeatedly writing about the terrorist structures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, and the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence, I want to speak candidly to America’s soldiers, pilots, intelligence officers, and military planners. If the United States is drawn into another war with Tehran, it will confront not the Iranian nation but a revolutionary regime that has made terrorism, hostage-taking, proxy warfare, and permanent crisis instruments of statecraft.
Generations of Americans before you fought and died confronting Nazism, communism, apartheid, and Stalinism. This time, the battlefield is different. You may be going to war against the most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism in the world — an evil regime that exports terrorism, war, and instability far beyond Iran’s borders. Do not confuse this regime with Iran, and do not allow its propaganda to turn the Iranian people as human shields. The Islamic caliphate of Shia mullahs is not Iran. The men and women of Iran are not the enemy. If American forces are sent into this confrontation, they will be fighting the machinery of terrorism that has oppressed Iranians at home while threatening Americans, Israelis, and others abroad.
That distinction should be the starting point for American military planning. For more than four decades, Tehran has built a security doctrine designed to keep war away from the regime itself. The Quds Force created strategic depth through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and other armed groups, enabling Tehran to threaten Israel, impose costs on the U.S., and destabilize neighboring states while insulating Iran’s ruling elite from the consequences. This was never simply a collection of proxies. It was an integrated architecture of coercion: terrorism and irregular warfare formed the outer layer; missiles and drones the second; and nuclear capability — or the claim of approaching it — the ultimate strategic shield. Tehran exported the risk while protecting the center.
Oct. 7 shattered the logic of that system. Israel learned at extraordinary cost that containment becomes an illusion when an adversary retains its command structure, financing, weapons, external patron, and intent to destroy you. Israel’s security doctrine consequently shifted from managing threats toward degrading the capabilities that generate them. Hamas has been severely diminished as a strategic asset; Hezbollah has come under enormous pressure; the Houthis face mounting constraints; and, most importantly, Tehran has learned that geographic distance no longer guarantees strategic sanctuary. Its doctrine of forward defense now faces perhaps its gravest crisis.
For American planners, however, this is precisely where the danger grows. A weaker adversary is not necessarily a less dangerous one. Capability and intent do not move in tandem. When a regime believes its military position will be worse six months from now, its incentive to wait diminishes. Tehran now faces eroding regional leverage abroad, economic deterioration at home, mounting public anger, and the prospect of another nationwide uprising. Under such conditions, strategic surprise, proxy attacks, missile operations, or a preemptive strike may become instruments not merely of foreign policy, but of regime survival. The critical intelligence question, then, is not simply, “What can Iran do?” but “What might Tehran decide it must do before its remaining options disappear?” That is the essence of the strategic-miscalculation problem at the heart of a possible third war.
This matters enormously for the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency. American intelligence must resist mirror-imaging Tehran’s decision-making. A cost-benefit calculation that appears irrational in Washington may look entirely different to a revolutionary leadership that believes its survival is at stake. Tehran may simultaneously seek negotiations, threaten American forces, activate proxy networks, and prepare for escalation. These actions are not necessarily contradictory; they can form a single survival strategy: negotiate for time, intimidate adversaries, preserve deterrence, and prepare an asymmetric response if diplomacy fails. Washington therefore needs an integrated warning picture encompassing political instability, elite behavior, Guard force posture, proxy activity, missile readiness, and internal repression — rather than assessing each indicator in isolation.
The reported CIA “Do Not Kill” list makes this problem even more consequential. If reports are accurate that Washington identified roughly 10 senior Iranian officials it believed could play roles in a future government and asked Israel not to target them, then the U.S. is apparently thinking beyond target selection toward political succession. That is understandable — but potentially dangerous and bizarre. Such calculations can reflect a deeper American failure to understand the brutality of the Khomeinist revolutionary system and the criminal apparatus that sustains it. What may look from Washington like a collection of useful technocrats, pragmatic insiders, or potential transitional figures may look profoundly different from inside Iran. To many Iranians, these officials belong to the same ruling apparatus they hold responsible for repression, mass killing, and the continuing execution of young Iranians. Washington should remember a fundamental lesson of Iran’s modern history: identifying seemingly useful or pragmatic figures inside a collapsing authoritarian system is not the same as identifying people who possess legitimacy to govern afterward. Preserving elements of a system that Iranians themselves may seek to dismantle at its roots could turn a tactical intelligence calculation into a strategic American mistake.
The U.S. should be especially cautious about allowing Tehran’s long tradition of deceptive diplomacy to shape assumptions about a post-Islamic Republic order. Preserving individuals simply because they present themselves as moderates, pragmatists, or indispensable intermediaries risks embedding tomorrow’s strategic problem in today’s target-selection process. The intelligence requirement must go deeper than asking which regime figures Washington can work with. It must determine whom they commanded, which institutions they served, their relationships with the Guard, Quds Force, and intelligence apparatus, their roles in domestic repression or external operations, and — critically — whether Iranian society would accept them. A “day after” strategy built around surviving members of the existing establishment risks preserving elements of the very security architecture the war was intended to dismantle.
The operational problem is equally complex. A third war may look very different in its final days than in its opening hours. Strikes could degrade missile infrastructure and command nodes while accelerating political fragmentation inside Iran. Tehran could respond by attacking American forces and allies, activating surviving proxy networks, intensifying domestic repression, or attempting to convert foreign confrontation into nationalist mobilization. Conversely, external military degradation could coincide with a nationwide uprising, creating mutually reinforcing pressure from outside and within. The military effects of a strike and its second- and third-order political consequences inside Iran therefore cannot be assessed separately.
That means U.S. Central Command and the broader U.S. national-security establishment must plan for more than target destruction. They must simultaneously consider escalation control, force protection, proxy retaliation, command-and-control disruption, continuity of Iranian state institutions, security of strategic weapons and facilities, and the possibility of sudden political rupture. The objective should never be to humiliate Iran. Iran is not the enemy; the Islamic Republic is a political system imposed upon it. Confusing the regime with the nation would be both a moral and strategic error. American forces must understand that distinction before the first aircraft takes off — not after the last target is struck.
The greatest American mistake, therefore, would be to prepare brilliantly for the opening phase of war but inadequately for the political consequences of victory. In 1979, Langley failed to anticipate how rapidly political order in Iran could disintegrate. Today, the CIA, DIA, Pentagon, and military commands have an opportunity not to repeat that failure. The central intelligence problem is no longer merely whether Tehran will attack, Israel will strike first, or another confrontation can remain limited. It is whether external war, internal revolt, and regime collapse are becoming components of a single contingency.
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Three years after Oct. 7, 2023, many of the men who embodied the architecture of terrorism and permanent war are gone. The historical line runs from Imad Mughniyeh, Qasem Soleimani, and Osama bin Laden to those who believed missiles, proxies, and ideological warfare could determine the Middle East’s future. Saddam Hussein fired missiles at Israel; dictators and extremist movements likewise imagined that violence could erase nations or bend history to their will. They disappeared. Iran remained. Israel remained.
That is the perspective American service members should carry into any coming confrontation. Today’s wars did not emerge from nowhere; they are the accumulated consequence of decades in which the Islamic Republic exported terrorism, manufactured crises, and turned neighboring countries into strategic battlefields. If that architecture is approaching its end, Washington must ensure that what replaces it is not the same system wearing different clothes. The task before America is therefore larger than winning a third war with Iran: it is defeating the machinery of terrorism without mistaking Iran for its rulers, protecting American forces without rescuing tomorrow’s autocrats from today’s regime, and opening the way for Iran and Israel — two nations that will outlive the men who tried to make them permanent enemies — to enter a different Middle East.
Erfan Fard is a counterterrorism analyst and Middle East studies researcher based in Washington, with a particular focus on Iran, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic conflicts in the region.