Iran's Mosaic Defence and Its Implications for Future Warfare:A Secondary Qualitative Study

Abstract

This article discusses the Iranian mosaic defence as a survival doctrine, a deterrence doctrine, and an operational continuity doctrine. It claims that mosaic defence is not a single weapons programme but a distributed security architecture that integrates provincial command, missile and drone capabilities, proxy partnerships, maritime disruption and political resilience. The article uses a secondary qualitative model and analyses academic sources, defence reports and assessments, policy reports and open-source security studies. Initially, the article provides a review of prior literature on Iranian strategic culture, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, asymmetric deterrence and the memory of the Iran-Iraq War. Then this article presents findings from another source corpus, so that the evidence used in the thematic analysis is not the same as that used in the literature review. The findings show that mosaic defence makes it challenging to establish conventional military superiority by depreciating the strategic worth of decapitating leadership, raising the cost-quality ratio of air and missile defence, expanding the conflict because of friend networks, and making maritime chokepoints politically influential. A compare-and-contrast debate illustrates that previous scholarly work is right in its explanation of Iran's insecurity and institutional behaviour, but that more recent evidence requires a more networked, multi-domain view. The paper concludes that more and more future wars will reward those actors who disperse, delegate, accept punishment