“The bar for success to the Islamic Republic was survival. So being able to survive as a regime is a win for them,” he said.

Despite this self-perception, the war has weakened the government in several key ways, some of which they may not recover anytime soon, depending on postwar agreements.

A battered military

The long interlude between the April ceasefire and the MOU focused much of the public discussion on the war’s economic effects and diplomatic negotiations. Nearly four months out from the start of Operation Epic Fury, the staggering scale of Iranian casualties often goes under the radar.

The 2026 war with Iran made history as one of, if not the most, lopsided armed conflict in modern history in terms of material and personnel losses. If counting only those killed by direct fire from one of the three main belligerents, the U.S. lost seven soldiers killed to Iranian fire and Israel lost nine, according to the latest official releases.

By comparison, Iran suffered 6,000 killed military and security personnel, according to an Israeli intelligence estimate from mid-March. Three more weeks of intense bombing took place after this estimate was put out, meaning the real total is likely thousands higher.

The Norway-based Hengaw Organization for Human Rights calculated that at least 6,620 military personnel were killed, another likely undercount given the internet blackout and restrictions on recording losses. Given the regime’s secrecy, the true number of dead may not be known for some time.

To put in perspective just how lopsided the casualties were, taking the undercount of 6,000 Iranians dead, roughly 375 Iranian military personnel were killed for every single U.S. and Israeli soldier. This ratio is unparalleled in any modern conflict, dwarfing even the Gulf War.

The damage to Iran’s defense and security infrastructure was just as bad, if not worse. Guards’ bases, Basij centers, military airports, missile launchers and storage sites, police stations, judicial centers, intelligence centers, Guards’ barracks, radars, air defense batteries, drone production and storage sites, and other critical infrastructure built up over decades were heavily targeted and destroyed, much of which was likely irreplaceable.

“Most military hardware has a use-life measured in decades, and rebuilding Iran’s nuclear program, missile production infrastructure, and naval fleet would require, not only substantial financial resources, but time, technical expertise, and supply chains that U.S. sanctions have already severely constrained,” FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power senior research analyst Daniel Swift and FDD’s CEFP senior director Elaine Dezenski wrote in a May report.

Iran’s major card was its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which was made possible due to the country’s presence on the vital waterway. Shipping came to a halt mainly because shipping insurance companies were unwilling to insure vessels traversing the strait, meaning Iran only had to scatter a relatively small number of mines and make a few symbolic drone attacks to effectively bring shipping to a halt.

Iran’s Guards were able to build up a reputation for competency and effectiveness over decades of operations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, positioning it for years as one of the most effective military powers in the region. Its one-sided destruction and overall poor performance in the war have shattered this aura, and will color its perception for years to come.

Of equal, related importance is the damage done to Iran’s economy from the war and blockade, damage totaling in the hundreds of billions. In its current state, Sayeh said Iran “absolutely” cannot rebuild its military or economy to anything approaching prewar standards, and could only partially reconstitute its economy if it pursues that end at the expense of everything else.

A restructured government

The opening of Operation Epic Fury saw a decapitation strike on Iran, with Israel and the U.S. killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ruler for decades, and nearly all senior military and civilian leaders. The killings forced a rapid adaptation of Iran’s entire political system, one that had solidified over decades, in mere days, while under fire.

Iran had slowly shifted from being an Islamic Republic run by a Shiite cleric into something bordering on a military dictatorship beginning when Khamenei took power, as he increasingly empowered the Guards to make up for the questionable loyalty of the clerical establishment. Before the war began, most analysts viewed the Guards as the main power base in Iran, and that they would likely choose the next supreme leader.

The success of the decapitation strikes accelerated this process, but the pressure also upended the preexisting Iranian hierarchy.

Iran had a contingency plan for the decapitation strikes, delegating power and decision-making authority to local commanders in the event of command-and-control breakdown, a strategy known as mosaic defense. While the strategy served the regime well in the short term, it also has the potential to completely restructure Iran’s politics in a more dysfunctional manner.

Dr. Fahil A. Abdulkareem, a professor at Iraq’s Duhok Polytechnic University, argued in Manara Magazine that the delegation of power had transformed Iran from a vertical power system to a “flat” power system, where several parallel power centers rule almost equally.

“While Iran’s sovereign decision-making apparatus was characterised for decades by a hierarchical structure governing its decision-making mechanisms, this leadership system … transformed into a flattened command structure after the recent 40-day war,” he wrote, arguing that this system encompassed both the political and military system, which became “headless” after Khamenei’s killing. 

“The absence of top-tier leaders and the rise of dozens of mid-level commanders led to the collapse of the hierarchical system and the emergence of a broad network of leaders with comparable status and influence,” Abdulkareem wrote.

“The rise of numerous parallel institutions, relatively equal in power and influence, and functioning in place of a single political institution, is a significant development. While the Iranian political establishment under the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a unified and highly cohesive entity, it transformed after his death into a collection of parallel institutions with limited interconnectedness,” Abdulkareem argued.

This transformation has been seen in the contradictory messaging from Tehran throughout the war. At several points, Guards-affiliated outlets issued harsh rebukes to decisions from Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian or other insufficiently hard-line leaders they opposed, forcing the president to sometimes retract statements.

The conflicting power bases would also help explain Iran’s over 70-member negotiating team representing the many different interests that traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, a detail noted by several outlets at the time.

Professor Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute and expert on the Guard and succession politics in Iran, told the Washington Examiner in March that Iran was run by “a power-sharing arrangement within a five-member collective leadership composed of the president, the parliamentary speaker, the judiciary chief, and one representative each from the regular Army and the IRGC, either Mohsen Rezaei or Ahmad Vahidi.”

Though Iran is dominated by parallel power centers for the moment, not all are equal. Nearly all analysts agree that the Guards hold the most power in the country, and that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who was pushed through the election process by the Guards, is their figurehead. Ahmad Vahidi, who became commander in chief of the Guards after his predecessor’s assassination on Feb. 28, is noted as particularly influential in decision-making as one of the few people who meets with Mojtaba Khamenei individually, according to some reports.

As Iran emerges from the war, the leadership may find that its mosaic defense strategy could have opened Pandora’s box. With the loss of Ali Khamenei’s institutional momentum and Mojtaba Khamenei’s lack of legitimacy, the new heads of the government may find it extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to bring back the prewar power arrangement.

Other analysts view the situation differently. Sayeh argued the new distribution of power is unlikely to last once the crisis ends.

“As soon as the situation improves a little bit, the hierarchy certainly has to be there. Something as totalitarian as the Islamic Republic would never allow autonomy in any way, nor would it even really make sense,” he argued, saying the status quo wouldn’t make sense as a lasting structure.

The decapitation strike also depleted much of the regime’s human capital, putting into power hard-liners who excel at repression but not much else. Hoover Institution research fellow and co-director of Stanford’s Iran Democracy Project, Abbas Milani, argued in an April appearance on the Hoover Institution’s GoodFellows podcast that some of the hard-liners now in charge were immensely incompetent.

“Rezaei, who by all accounts has a Ph.D. in economics. I apologize to all the economists of the world, but he’s a true imbecile, and was an imbecile when he was a commander of the [Guards], which almost put him on trial for crimes because he sent thousands of young Iranians to sure death because of his idiocies,” Milani said.

The new government that emerges from the war is likely far out of its depth when handling the complicated matters of administration in a country whose economy has been in free fall for over a year.

The mask comes off

While there’s some disagreement as to where the shift is going, most analysts agree the war engineered a major ideological shift in Iran’s ruling establishment. Iran had long been shifting away from the conservative ideology pioneered by the Islamic regime’s founder, former Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, focused on religious authority, a universal Islamic revolution, and social conservatism, toward the Guards’ fusion of Iranian nationalism with Shia Islam, more concerned with national security and much less focused on social legislation such as hijab enforcement.

Sayeh believes the war has essentially destroyed what was left of the clerical establishment’s legitimacy and removed any window dressing suggesting the country wasn’t a de facto military dictatorship.

“The structural shift is that I think less and less the Islamic Republic as a whole needs religious legitimacy. The idea was you need these ayatollahs, the range of them, to all of them coming from different committees to give the Guards some sort of a religious legitimacy, so they don’t look like a military dictatorship,” he said.

“Now that they know they’re inherently legitimate, given the uprisings internally, it’s just about survival at this point. We also entered a paradigm where the clergy rely on the [Guards] more so than the other way around,” Sayeh continued.

Milani agreed in his April appearance on the Hoover Institution’s GoodFellows podcast, saying Iran “is now in every sense of the word a military dictatorship.”

However, Sayeh argued there won’t be much inter-elite fighting, as the Guards and the supreme leader’s establishment “don’t disagree on anything to begin with.”

Milani argued another way to view the postwar shift is through the movement away from ideological fanaticism to corruption.

“This is a corrupt ideological regime,” he said. “They’re now more corrupt than they’re ideological. They want to keep property rights. The [Guards] literally control at least half the Iranian economy. Whoever takes Khamenei’s place, the [Guards] de facto or de jure gets their hands on at least $100 billion of assets. This is a mafia-like regime that is going to try to stay in power.”

Milani pointed to Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, reportedly viewed by the Trump administration as a good interlocutor, as the “most corrupt.”

HOW IRAN TRANSFORMED FROM AN ISLAMIC REPUBLIC TO A MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

Sayeh argued the best dichotomy through which to view the government is between the ideological and the survivalist, the latter denoting more pragmatic members who understand the gravity of the situation Iran is facing.

The loss of a key pillar of legitimacy could bode poorly for the government in the near future, especially after it can’t rely on a crisis for repressive measures.